The NSF has been taking polls of students for decades, asking whether they believed in Evolution and The Big Bang. They dropped that question this year, because it was getting too many "false negatives", people who were well-educated but didn't believe in one or the other. This drives some science educators nuts, who want naturalism and science to be equated to each other. The reluctance to buy into evolution is well-documented, but perhaps you are a bit fuzzy about the Big Bang reluctance. A news item this week reveals just how uncertain these cosmology theories are, but don't tell that to the NSF.

Here's the scoop on the Big Bang. Back when Einstein was alive, he wanted his field equations to reveal a steady state universe. This is simply because there are two answers to "Why are we here?" and he didn't like the "Because there is a Creator" answer, so he opted for the "There is neither beginning nor end" answer formulated by Epicurus and Democritus some 2500 years ago. Gravity, you see, was an attractive force that could not be neutralized, and so the universe was predicted to collapse at some point in the future. Newton solved this problem by having God tweaking things to keep them uniformly distributed so that everyone is pulled equally in all directions, but Einstein had ruined Newton's solution by demonstrating that space itself would collapse under the weight of galaxies, no matter how much tweaking was done.

So Einstein invented the "Cosmological Constant", an anti-gravity term in his equations that wasn't proportional to matter (like real gravity), but proportional to space (sorta like a pressure.) This balanced out gravity and if everyone's galaxy was well-behaved and sitting quietly, then collapse could be postponed. Unfortunately Hubble showed that everyone was screaming away from everyone else at a fairly good clip. Einstein called this constant "his greatest mistake" and we all became "Big Bang" believers. Well when space expands as you're pushing on it, there is work being done, and work is the same as energy, so this mysterious anti-gravity pressure thingy acquired the name "Dark Energy", a relabelling to avoid the bad press of Einstein's recant.  Same mistake, new name.

Fast forward 50 years, and "dark energy" is all the rage. As far as I can tell, it is because the cosmology models that have enough bang to explain the data, mess up the distribution of galaxies. And if we scale the bang down, then we fall into a black hole. So "dark energy" is another dial that enables modellers to achieve agreement with the data using both "bang" and "balloon". The current consensus is 75% is "balloon" and the rest is "bang".

Now relying on models to tune your theory is about as risky as using the IPCC climate change predictions to buy a waterfront property in Vermont. We'd really like some data on this "dark energy" thingy, and a provocative paper came out 10 years ago that said "distant supernovae are dimmer than expected" which they then claimed was evidence for an accelerating "dark energy" term. NASA got into the act, and said they would spend a $1bn on finding the cause of dark energy, and suddenly Einstein's "biggest mistake" is looking like a cash cow.

"Not so fast", said some astronomers, who coincidently are ineligible for NASA funding, "we can construct Einstein-model universes that have no dark energy." (I've blogged on Penrose's version too.) To get agreement with the models and the data, all they needed to do was to put a large bubble in the cake, and put the Milky Way in the middle of the bubble. That is, they sacrificed "homogeneity" to get rid of "dark energy".  Who is right? It's hard to work up a frenzy for "belief in homogeneity", which is why the press releases started calling it "The Copernican Principle," but I would trade any number of inhomogeneous data sets for the modellers current penchant for "dark energy & the Copernican principle".

Well, now we have some data on this bubble theory, and not surprisingly (considering where the funding is going), it supports the status quo "dark energy" theory. The presser says that bubbles are out, dark energy is in. And while I'm disappointed that standard physics doesn't explain our current "acceleration", I'm not surprised because I don't think we are actually being accelerated at all. The real message is not that "status quo wins again" but ratherthat over-hyped claims for acceleration haven't really eliminated all the simpler explanations that are out there. We don't hear about all these challenges to the status quo until they are "decisively disproven", but why the claimed certainty on the original model then? It is reminiscent of the thousandth time we read that "Darwin has finally been proved by the discovery of this essential missing link..." Well, if it was so essential, then why are just hearing about it for the first time? In the same way, if standard cosmology is so certain, then why is this result so important?

I'm a big fan of scientific consensus, but the big budget programs have been the biggest distortion of science since the Manhattan Project. How about honesty in advertising? Why not say, "Our current model of cosmology..." or "The Neo-Darwinian Theory of evolution?" How can a little humility be bad for science? It certainly might improve the NSF.

John Lennox, a mathematics professor at Oxford who also is a fellow in the philosophy of science and pastoral advisor, has composed a masterful reply in the form of this short book, to the atheist claims made by last year's best-seller, The Grand Design, written by Hawking and Mlodinow.  The book is intended to address a wider audience than Hawking, responding to typical atheist arguments with a compelling logic and deep understanding of Western philosophy. In addition to this classical apologetics, Lennox also responds to the esoteric physical theories of Hawking with the wry amusement of a Platonic mathematician who actually believes in Math addressing an Aristotelian physicist who merely uses it. It is clear early on that Lennox is neither awed by Hawking's claims nor deferential to Hawking's position. In Lennox' opinion, Hawking has overstepped his culturally-bestowed authority to represent science, and must be publically reprimanded lest science (and faith) fall into disrepute.
 
Stephen Hawking, of course, is the physicist who recently retired from the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge that was once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton. What made him famous may have been his erudite expertise in Black Holes, his famous position, his crippling physical illness (Lou Gehrig's disease in the US, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for everyone else who doesn't know baseball), or even perhaps his incredible fortitude at surviving 40 years with a 5 year prognosis that has left him so completely paralyzed he can only blink his eyes to communicate. In any case, Hawking's 1989 book on the Big Bang, "A Brief History of Time" was a surprising best-seller, in which Hawking suggested that physics may reveal the mind of God. In this 2010 sequel, Hawking comes out of the closet as a full-throated atheist who found the mind of God--and it is Stephen Hawking.

Lennox' systematic dissembly of Hawking's arguments is classic, and for all those who have tried to argue with atheists, this book not just a treasury of knowledge, but an example of a generous but firm rebuttal, of "giving reason for the hope" without giving offense. Not only does Lennox employ an apologetics that stretches from 500BC Aristotle's four causes to modern discussions of "Representative Theory of Perception", or from 18th century Laplacian determinism to 21st century Quantum Realism, but he avoids the speculative philosophizing that mar the apologetics of many of his contemporaries. His defense of Western (or what I like to think of as Christian) science is masterful, and demonstrates the necessity for science to find that delicate balance which neither deifies Nature nor deifies Man, but allows us "to think God's thoughts after him."  In other words, Lennox is a rock-solid Evangelical defending rock-solid science with rock-solid logic. It doesn't get any better than this, for an Evangelical anyway.

However there is something disturbing about Hawking's book, something that doesn't add up. The man is clearly dying, and everything he writes comes with extreme effort. In his condition, every publication, every day could be his last, so why this book? A recent interview took one week for him to compose a few-paragraph response. Likewise, a book of this length could not possibly have been written without the help of his co-author Leo Mlodinow. Then is this book, as Umberto Eco asserts, so philosophically shallow and so scientifically arrogant because it was entirely the work of Mlodinow? Certainly nothing about Mlodinow inspires the sort of admiration that Hawking attracts, but if so, why did Hawking waste his reputation on the cover of the book?

Arrogance or cunning? Incompetence or malice? Recall that atheist Dawkins also divided theists into these same categories, so we are justified in applying it to atheists Hawking and Mlodinow.

In previous blogs, I have suggested there are almost always personal reasons why brilliant scientists adopt a less-than-brilliant atheism, which may be a contribution to Hawking's progressively more militant position between 1989 and 2010. But as I read Lennox' rebuttal, I detected a cat-and-mouse game. Hawking is not so dumb as Eco thinks, laying a trap that Lennox narrowly avoids, but may catch those of us with less charitableness than him. He is playing Post-Modern critic to Lennox' Modern apologetics.

Lennox suspects this, and spends a few pages attacking Post-Modern relativising, but judging by the Post-Modern success of the "angry atheists" such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, the public may still be unmoved by the cold rationalism of Lennox, preferring the passionate glory of Hawking. That is, rationalism reached its acme in 20th century modernism, with writers such as Bertrand Russell demolishing, and CS Lewis defending, Christianity in logical terms. This is the form of debate that Lennox imbibed in his morning porridge, and what makes his book a 20th century classic. But the 21st century is all about passion, about anger validating one's opinions, about ad hominem arguments and saving-the-world rhetoric. Post-Moderns do not care about your logic, they care about your passion--are you concerned about the immanent apocalypse, about saving the world? If not, then may your logic perish with you!

And so Hawking has presented his best effort at saving the world. It is about freedom from restraints, freedom from guilt. It is about alternate realities and exploding universes. It is about crushing Black Holes that consume everything and yet finding the information that will survive them. It is about incredibly difficult mathematics in eleven dimensions and the insignificance of man in his pitiful three dimensions, but for the mind that can escape those bounds. In a word, it is about him.

And all Lennox can talk about is the submission to logic and infinite being?

I said Lennox may have narrowly escaped this trap of supplying an old and trite logic for a new and passionate plea, and this is because he ends his book with what, for an old-school British schoolmaster, is a most emotional statement:

I even dare to hope that, for some of you, this little book may be the start of a journey that will eventually lead to your coming to believe in the God who not only made the universe but also conferred on you the immeasurable dignity of creating you in his image, with the capacity for thought and the intellectual curiosity that got you reading this book in the first place. In turn that could even be, as it was for me, the first step in embarking on what is by definition life’s highest adventure – getting to know the Creator through the Son that has revealed him.

For this is the only answer to Post-Modernism, and the most important response Hawking will ever get.

One of the comments on the previous post caused me to do some further analysis, which I had said I wouldn't post, but have reconsidered. The comment was: 

This seems like an odd tact on Dennis’ part and I don’t understand the point.
If, Dennis’ position (I’m going to call it “Agnostigner” – someone who is agnostic about the Designer) is correct and the Designer is irrelevant, then what does ID bring to any table scientifically?
If the Designer is irrelevant, what does the explanation of design tell us about the world/universe? Does it impact any other scientific explanation in anyway and if so, how?

So let's start by analyzing the "odd tact" of Dennis, which seemed odd to me as well, until I realized it was a version of the demarcation problem.

The Odd Tactic

a) In 1963 physicists proposed a Big Bang solution to the riddle of cosmological data. But it looks like it undermines the Epicurean/Democritean materialism that says matter and time are eternal. So after 20 years or so of fretting (documented in Robert Jastrow’s “God and the Astronomers”) physicists come to the cognitively dissonant position that it is impossible to discuss anything shorter than a Planck time after the Big Bang. It’s just a physical and metaphysical boundary, a DMZ.

Similar debates occurred in 1870 when Presbyterian James Clerk-Maxwell found evidence for atoms, which seemed to undermine the Christian story of creation. His answer (given in a lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science) was that atoms exist, but we can’t say anything about how they are created. So the DMZ was erected by theists to protect theology in 1870, but now used by atheists to protect atheology in 1970.

b) Then in 1990, along comes ID claiming that the fine-tuning of our universe is evidence of design. The DMZ is breached. In 1890 it was atheist Bultmann’s development of statistical mechanics, that generalized this atomic stuff to the entire universe. Maxwell’s DMZ line was breached.

Just as atheism spread rapidly in 1900, leading to two World Wars, so also this ID stuff is spreading rapidly in 2000, looking to undermine Darwinism, evolution, and the whole Materialist enterprise. Angry atheists like Dawkins or PZ Myers are name-calling and fuming, but the whole time they are back-pedalling. What is a thinking atheist to do?

c) Dennis is trying to defuse the ID advance using the same strategy as physics did when they were confronted with the Big Bang. You develop a plethora of theories that diffuse the boundary, until it seems as if the breach of the DMZ never occurred. Big Bang bounces, quantum-loops, quantum-foam, multiverses, landscape theory, string-theory are all diffusing the fact that the data all support a beginning to our universe.

So Dennis says, “This Designer thing is getting to you, right? So lets make a lot of Designer theories to diffuse the impact of admitting a beginning. And after you see all these theories of alternate Designers, you will realize that ID may be true, but you still don’t need to admit a personal designer.”

My problem with both physicists and Dennis is that a bucket-load of bad theories does not change the fact that there has been a sea-change in philosophy, with Materialism losing all the credibility it had gained in 1900.

BTW, theists in 1900 also tried to resist the atheist tide, the two most notable solutions being German liberalism and fundamentalism. Liberalism tried to find a theology that didn’t care whether the Creation account was true or not, and Fundamentalism denied the validity of any theology. Dennis is applying the first solution and Dawkins the second.

So perhaps what is puzzling you is the conversation occurring between Dennis the Liberal Atheist and Dawkins the Fundamentalist Atheist.

The ID Advantage

Why would Dennis want to admit ID in the first place? What advantage is gained in acknowleging ID?

This is so obvious as to be unnoticed. Nearly every advance in biology in the past 40 years has been made by asking "What is the purpose of that?" Say you discover that it takes 12 steps for coagulating blood when one or two would do just fine, and so someone spent a long time deciphering the purpose of such a complex procedure. Or we find that DNA is composed of 4 nucleotides that appear in random proportions, and Nobel prizes were awarded for discovering why. That is to say, purpose is not just a nice thing to find, but essential to scientific progress. Darwin denies purpose, claiming that all these things are merely "apparent purpose."  But after 150 years, this mantra is wearing thin. Only by making "apparent purpose" into real, bona fide, functional, designed intention, can we make the sort of progress that is observed in the past 30 years.

Let's see how this works. Darwin says, "No, the tongue of the hawkmoth wasn't made a foot long just to get the nectar of the star orchid, rather, the hawkmoth accidently discovered that a longer tongue got more nectar, so it evolved toward longer tongues." Ignoring the special pleading for Lamarckian evolution, what Darwin is saying is that functionally useful stuff will be selected by Natural Selection. But what happens when the functionally useful stuff has an intermediate step? What if the hawkmoth could survive by appealing to human beings who bred it in captivity? How is "human appeal" a functional thing that natural selection would select for? It's completely arbitrary, and not a linear thing, like "the more red the wings, the more appeal it will have".

In exactly this same fashion, DNA has no functional properties. Longer DNA doesn't make the cell live better, nor shorter DNA. Rather its the intermediate step that turns DNA into proteins that has functional properties. So the only reason DNA gets "selected" by natural selection is because it has a non-material, informational purpose, not because it does stuff. In fact, you don't want your computer hard drive to do anything else but store stuff, because if it turned out to be needed for heating coffee or making nice noises, then you couldn't upgrade your hard drive and you'd never be sure if you wouldn't lose data because your teenagers were playing rock music on it or making too much coffee. Likewise, the DNA has to be functionally inert, or it wouldn't store information very well. Chemists knew this had to be true of any information molecule long before DNA was discovered to hold information. 

Once again, if DNA has no function, then natural selection can't select for it. So any theory that discounts purpose, cannot explain why DNA is a non-functional, but highly purposeful molecule.

ID is just such a scientific theory that includes purpose. And biology, despite its attempt to call everything "apparent purpose", is finding that purposeless functionalism cannot predict, cannot describe, and cannot explain most everything learned in the last 30 years.
So when scientists switch to ID modelling, they can make predictions (why convergent evolution should be common), construct functional models (why a computer hard drive works for DNA transcription), and explain anomalous behavior (why altruism is hard-wired) far better than their colleagues who cling to a purposeless functionalism. Then when ID scientists make dramatic progress in fields where Darwinists are stagnant, people sit up and notice.

And that's why Dennis Jones is trying hard to reap the benefits of purpose without the consequences of purpose--he wants design without the designer.

I recently found a very nice blog post on the definition of "Intelligent Design" by non-theist Dennis Jones. If you have ever wondered what Intelligent Design is about, or whether ID is a scientific enterprise, or even if ID is making any headway in the scientific establishment, then read this blog. It's better written than anything I've ever blogged about on the subject (yeah, faint praise.)

Dennis, however, wants to go beyond ID, and talk about some of the other implications of ID. For example, does ID have something to say about cosmology, or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics? The thread that connects all these other scientific disciplines with ID is "information". ID purports to discover information, the kind made by intelligent agents, or "Complex Specified Information." Cosmology asks whether this is a conserved quantity in the Universe, something the even Black Holes can't erase. Thermodynamics asks whether conservation of information and conservation of energy are really the same thing. And quantum mechanics asks whether information can be quantized, whether it is something that comes atom-by-atom, and what this implies for reality. (QM has a rocky relationship with reality, so it's a bit unfair to drag its problems into this discussion, but the soap opera can be entertaining as long as we don't let ourselves get too involved.)

But this isn't what everyone wants to know about ID's implications, they want to know "what does ID say about the Designer?" Dennis entitled his post, Quantum Theory as Original Source of Information, and begins by dismissing that question:

ID Theory has nothing to do with creationism or a designer. There is no philosophical contemplation as to a designer any more than the Big Bang theory has anything to say about a banger.It is impossible to complain about the “designer” of Intelligent Design Theory without resolving the “banger” inferred by the Big Bang Theory. One cannot deny there is a “banger” if they insist there is a designer, and vice versa.

Is Dennis for or agin' it? I was initially confused by this post, until I realized that Dennis is addressing atheists who accept the Big Bang but complain about ID. Dennis is trying to find a third way. Here's a helpful chart that tries to separate the different responses to this question.

Answer to the Q: ID Designer?	Atheist Response	Theist Response	Agnostic Response
1) Designer = God	Creationist!	Of course.	Possibly.
2) Designer = Chance	Of course.	Not possible.	Possibly.
3) Designer = Irrelevant	Crypto-creationist!	Nothing is irrelevant!	My hero!

Conclusions
Dennis is clearly swayed by the rigor of the ID arguments, and he wants to silence the strident complaints of atheists who feel personally attacked by the ID "crypto-theists." But in his mollifying attempt to admit ID without a designer, he hasn't yet learned the philosopher's ROE (rules of etiquette) -- "don't display your metaphysical ignorance." There is no doubt that ID has a metaphysic, just as there is no doubt that Democritus and Materialism have metaphysics. So the meticulous avoidance of metaphysics by ID is not due to some conspiracy to hide a crypto-theism, but simply to be respectful of everyone's metaphysical position while narrowly addressing the scientific aspects of information detection. It's a matter of etiquette, which will evolve as the demarcation problem itself evolves.

Philosophy, after all, is a gentleman's occupation, and is a wholly unsuitable club for the dog-eat-dog scientist. Dennis' recognition that his former atheist colleagues need to chill and be polite may not mark the beginning of the end of Darwinism, but it is  the end of the beginning.
------------

*At freshman orientation in my local university, the atheists club informed us that they were now to be called "the non-theists club". One college student at the exhibit exclaimed, "Oh, I had thought you were against writing theses!" The future of America lies in the hands of such.

Cornelius Hunter just posted a wonderful blog about the "debate" between Newton and Laplace about the origin of the solar system. Newton remained a committed Theist to his dying day, believing that God created the planets in their orbits, but had to fix them occasionally to keep them in line. Laplace, on the other hand, "had no need for that hypothesis" and in the original "god-of-the-gaps" argument, reduced God's job requirements by one.

No, make that two, because Laplace formulated a "Nebular Hypothesis" explanation of the creation of the solar system (1796), so God didn't actually have to create the planets either. Immanuel Kant really liked the nebular hypothesis, and wrote quite a long treatise on it early in his career in 1755. No, it certainly wasn't as famous as his later work, but you can see how this god-of-the-gaps thing converted people into atheists and rationalists.

Well the Nebular Hypothesis made it into physics books very early, and Newton got booted out of astronomy, though his theory of  forces was de-deified and makes a big part of the introductory physics curriculum where it has been used to promote a materialist philosophy that we are nothing but atoms bouncing in the void. Clearly Laplace won that debate.  But curiously, there haven't been any experimental proofs of the Nebular Hypothesis.

Oh sure, we can set up a simulation of five million particles in a cloud and follow Newton's laws of motion for a hundred thousand timesteps to watch this simulation crank out planets. And yes, it takes a very special condition to get the simulation to make planets. And yes, the arrangement of our solar system is an even stranger one than most, making it one of those "Anthropic Proofs". But this isn't science! It's a  simulation!  (I know, I know, I've offended all those "computational physics" people out there, but look, would you believe a scientist who said "I can explain human behavior using a computer running millions of copies of "The Sims"?)

Where's the experimental proof?

Now my specialty in science is making really tiny mass spectrometers that can fly on satellites and measure the really hot material trapped in the earth's magnetic field, or even flowing straight from the Sun. Please forgive me for bragging, but before my design for a mass spectrometer, the best measurements of the solar wind could barely separate helium from oxygen, and couldn't even come close to measuring the isotopes of oxygen. With my "isochronous mass spectrometer" design, we  suddenly could separate the isotopes of oxygen, the isotopes of nickel, and measure everything in the solar wind, and between 1990 and 2000 three versions of my instrument were launched into space.

Why is this important?

Because the Sun is the largest object in our solar system, and if the Nebular Hypothesis is right, we should all be made out of the same material as the Sun. And while spectroscopically we could measure the elements in the Sun, we didn't know their isotopic composition. But the isotopes track the history of where the stuff has been. Was the Sun created from the ashes of a supernovae? Was the Sun a second or a third generation star, being born 8 billion years after the birth of our galaxy? The isotopes will tell us.

As luck would have it, my college roommate and fellow physicist was also working on mass spectrometers at Cal Tech where his boss made him analyze meteorites, but of course, would never promote him to a tenured job. It just doesn't happen at Cal Tech.  So when a job in space physics at Los Alamos National Lab opened up, I told him this was too good an opportunity to miss. He got the job and started working on, you guessed it, solar wind mass spectrometry.

We really weren't competitors in mass spectrometers, because I built the ones for space that fit in a shoebox, whereas his filled a room and waited for space to deliver the goods. But one day he makes a special visit to  my lab in Switzerland and asks me a confidential question. "Is there something you cannot measure?"

Wow. That was a loaded question.

If I were writing a proposal, say, asking NASA to fund another $5 million instrument for the only solar wind space mission in this decade , I would definately never tell the failings of my instrument. If you reveal the slightest weakness, then your competitor with the stupid instrument he got to build because his wife knows the senator from Maryland,  will use that weakness against you when NASA asks for a "write-in" review. Even if it is nonsensical, the panel reviewers might think it was a devastating criticism and that would be the end of your space career. Nope, its a Darwinian world out there in academia, and you never never never show weakness.

But he was my roommate. Where does Darwin end and altruism begin? Was my success just a product of evolutionary chance, or could I help out his career even to the detriment of mine?

Fortunately, neither of us were Darwinists, so I told him the deep dark secret.

"I can't measure O18," I said, "the measurement technique always has a high-mass tail to each peak, and the tail from O16 swamps the signal from O18."

So he went on to propose a $150M NASA mission, which would put a spacecraft out in the solar wind, expose some silicon plates, bring them back in and parachute to Earth where he could put them in his room-sized mass spectrometer and measure O18 from the Sun. His proposal got smashingly good reviews.

Even NASA said it was great, but couldn't fund it because the acronym wasn't pronounceable. (Seriously.)

So he renamed it GENESIS, and proposed it again.

This time NASA funded it, and everything went great except the parachutes didn't open. (They were wired backwards.) The return capsule hit the Utah desert at over a hundred miles per hour.

However, he did collect enough Silicon wafer fragments out of the crater to put in his machine.

What did he find?

The O18 was more numerous than O16 on Earth.

What does this mean?

Laplace was wrong. Again.

Too late to tell Immanuel Kant, but now you won't have to make the same "god-of-the-gaps" mistake. Because Newton was right.

God is still in the gap.

Jonathan Wells' The Myth of Junk DNA, is a well-written book that manages to accomplish two separate tasks: to silence the Darwinists who had claimed that recent genomic discoveries supported their dystopic version of The Signature in the Cell; and to bring all of us up-to-date on the breath-taking mysteries being decoded from this most ancient script.

He begins by picking up where Stephen Meyer left off, telling us that within each cell is this memory chip, this software program that directs everything we are and ever meant to be. When Watson and Crick decoded the DNA, there was great expectation that soon we would find the gene to every talent and attribute we had ever wished we had been born with. Sci-fi was filled with stories about a DNA pill that would turn you into a concert pianist, a ballerina, or a nuclear physicist, because the genes for all these talents could manually remedy what evolution had denied you. Soon a billion-dollar government program was begun to decode the human genome, after which, it was widely touted, we would find the cure to cancer and the common cold. The three billion base pairs of the human genome, it was thought, would hold genes stacked up cheek-to-jowl, together encoding some 100,000 different proteins. We knew how to count genes because we had already decoded the way the cell made protein, first by making RNA copies of the DNA, and then sending the RNA to the ribosome factory, which could identify the unique "start" and "stop" codes among the 64 different 3-letter "words" of the RNA software that marked the beginning and end of each gene.

After a decade of work and to everyone's great surprise, the human genome project found only 10,000 such start-stop pairs, suggesting that you and I are made out of fewer proteins than an amoeba! Furthermore, over 90% of the missing genes were DNA that apparently did nothing. Much of this "dark matter" was in long "stutter repeats" that couldn't even make a useful protein if you inserted the start and stop codons yourself. All that work, and nothing to show for it! Neither cancer nor the common cold was cured, and instead an even greater mystery was uncovered.

Wells carefully documents (with an extensive scientific bibliography) how a two-fold approach was taken to soften the blow. Scientifically, other genomes were transcribed and compared to ours, to see what were the essential parts common to all. Sophisticated techniques to "knock-out" chunks of DNA were also used (on animals) to see what happened when this non-protein-encoding DNA was taken out of commission. Simultaneously, the Darwinian "answer machine" was cranked up to explain why we should all have expected that 90% of our genome did nothing. (This, after earlier explaining how evolution made DNA the most efficient software ever discovered.) "Evolution is blind", we were told, and "junk DNA" is what you expect when random chance throws you together from odds and ends and doesn't know how to tell the difference between gold and dross. Furthermore, it looked as if some of the junk DNA was defunct viruses that had managed to multiply "infect" the DNA before being shut down by having their start-stop codons removed. And all this junk and scarred DNA, we were told, is evidence that no intelligence much less design had ever graced our genome.

Once again, Wells shows how the continued scientific efforts did not support "the myth of junk DNA." For if it really was useless, it should mutate rapidly and unrelated organisms should show almost no similarities in their junk. Instead, it was discovered that many sections of even stuttering repeats were conserved better than protein-encoding sections, suggesting it was doing something important. Furthermore, removing this DNA often caused death or deformity in the animals. More recently it was found that far from being junk, most of this 90% junk DNA was being transcribed into RNA, which is now found to be doing a myriad of jobs around the cell.

Wells goes on to list many of the jobs that "junk RNA" is doing, including turning on and off the ribosome, turning on or off the recycling of RNA, editing the RNA to produce up to 1000 different proteins from one "gene" of DNA, responding to external stimuli, defending the cell against attack, and generally providing an entire layer of control circuitry between DNA and proteins. More or less what you would expect from commissioned officers in a well-functioning army.

But this doesn't exhaust the utility of junk DNA. Wells goes on to suggest that DNA has mechanical properties needed when the cell divides and two identical copies of the DNA have to be separated into the respective daughter cells. The fibrils that pull the DNA have to attach somewhere, and one function of junk DNA is to provide a mechanical attachment. Further, two genes often have to be transcribed together, and their compact storage mechanism that has them all wound up like hose on a reel would prevent them from being close to each other. But by arranging the spacing by inserting junk DNA between them, the two genes can twist themselves to be immediately adjacent. However the most unbelievable use for junk DNA is found in the eyes of nocturnal mammals. Normally cells put their junk DNA (heterochromatin) out at the periphery of the nucleus, and the useful DNA (euchromatin) in the center, but in the retinal cells of these mammals, the denser junk DNA is clumped in the middle of the cell, so as to form a convex lens that pulls the light rays toward the center, and so focus even more light on the rods below. Junk DNA is acting as a night-vision goggle!

All these discoveries destroy the myth that evolution makes junk, and leaves us dumbfounded by the many overlapping and varied uses of this simple computer code. It would be as if you could make a telescope out of computer printouts, or fry an egg on your laptop. I'm sure the Darwin answer machine will eventually find a just-so story for this surprise, but in the meantime, Wells has me chortling at their speechless, gape-mouthed expression.

Yet even more spine-tingling is the sense that we are seeing truly dense information storage, something far more elegant than a Donald Knuth computer code. We expected to find something resembling our FORTRAN or machine-code assembly language, but instead we found something far more baroque, far more detailed, far more advanced than even Microsoft Windows. For in 3 Gigabytes, Microsoft barely gets Windows up and running for an expected lifetime of 5 years and it still must be patched monthly for the latest viruses, but in 3 Gigacodons, an entire baby is constructed with a full set of repairs for the assaults of countless viruses and the insults of an 80-year lifetime. If Meyers has shown the cell to have a software signature, then Wells has shown it to be written as poetry in an unknown tongue, replete with rhymes and stanzas and refrains and harmonies we can barely hear. If Meyers taught us to read DNA, Wells teaches us to sing it.

Highly recommended.

We've been looking at Victor Stenger's claim that fine-tuning is a fallacy. In part one, we looked at the two fundamental metaphysical theories of the universe--materialist and theist--recognizing how materialists have been losing ground by being forced to admit to a creation, making multiverse-theory a rear-guard action covering their retreat, which attempts to turn the unwanted creator into an impersonal force.

In part two, we discussed the Widow's Mite fallacy where Stenger uses physical units for a metaphysical property, which like Jesus' disciples, mistakes a physical quantity for a metaphysical one. The most obvious difference between the two is that physical quantities have units, whereas metaphysical ones are unitless. But in addition, metaphysical quantities are percentages, integrals, they involve a comparison of areas or volumes, as in Bayesian hypothesis testing we are making a ratio of the range to the domain of a fit variable.

Superficially, Stenger appears to be working in unitless numbers when he normalizes his "fine-tuning" variables with a Planck-scale "metaphysical reciprocal" so as to achieve unity, which prevents computer calculations from having hiccups on really big or really small numbers, but this is not the metaphysical integral as used by Jesus because the normalization is, as Stenger himself says, merely a change of the length scale into "theory units," but physical units nonetheless. Then Stenger claims without any proof that his unity is what theorists expect, as if he has carried out the metaphysical calculation, when in actuality Stenger's normalization is chosen purely to look reasonable. Now to his credit, many previous writers in the field of "fine-tuning" are still using physical units and are equally guilty of the Widow's Mite fallacy, but Stenger has not escaped by converting to "theory units", he needs to work in Bayesian units, in integrals over range and domain.

And it is the integral over the domain that is the Pandora's Box, the siren song of infinity, the world of Titans and Frost Giants. Why do I use these mythologies? Because the triumph of the Olympians, the triumph of Asgard, is that of reason over unreason, of order over disorder, of mind over matter, of intelligence over brute strength, of personality over chaos, while the incantation of infinity used by the multiverse-theory unlocks the gates of Asgard and the bonds of the Titans, returning us to the miseries of meaninglessness. Let me try to outline these miseries in an order intending to escalate the pain.

The Anthropocentric Fallacy
Many times one will come across an atheist argument intended to attack a personal Creator, where the atheist will say something like "only an insane god would create mosquitos" and then argue that atheism is far better than madness. The examples are too easy to find and too easy to create to make it worthwhile listing them, but Darwin made these sorts of arguments, and I've seen them applied to sloths, to the recurrent larygeal nerve in giraffes, human tailbones-appendix-tonsils etc. One can find this sort of argument expressed in morals too, as in "only an evil god would allow child-molesters" etc. As CS Lewis observed, the implication is that we are smarter, more moral, more rational, more whatever, than God. Such a view is already atheist even before it concludes that God doesn't exist, because it assumes that the Creation can judge the Creator, using some standard that evidently is clear to us but not to God. In other words, it already assumes man is God, and that the god who apparently had previously ruled is no match for our newly enlightened intellect (= god is dead), so the conclusions are all contained in the assumptions.

Nor is this fallacy restricted to theological debates, for it is made by multiverse-theories that assume some sort of "parameter space" for physical constants, and then assume some sort of Great Casino Crapshoot to select universes by variation of physical constants. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the parameter space of fine-structure constants was arranged logarithmically, then most of the crapshooting occurs in the bottom half. Or what if it were arranged thermodynamically, and it all occurs in a very narrow range around the present value? Who is to say how the Grand Craps Table of Life is tipped? For that matter, what if the dice are not six-sided, what if they are 11-dimensional dice? What if 11-dimensions support Möbius dice that have only one side? What if probability doesn't work anything like our 3-D version? What then?

And this is my point. Assuming some distribution of random choices is an anthropocentricism of multiverse-theory. We are woefully incapable of grasping 3-dimensional science, and therefore making predictions based on 11-dimensional science is both pointless and misleading. Converting that to some sort of probability is hubris to the 11th dimension. This cannot be decent science, it cannot even be decent metaphysics because it hides its assumptions while making conclusions that are clearly presupposed.

In this sense, religion has trumped rationality, and multiverse-theory has launched into a Nietzschian world of "might makes right", of raw political power suppressing intellectual rigor. We have taken the keys of Asgard and given them away, we have placed them in the hands of the shackled Titans.

The Sixth Circle of Infinity
"But I'm not irrational",  says the multiverse-theorist, "because all those probability distributions are rendered irrelevant if you have infinite chances. It's a red herring."

Oh? And can you explain to me why 11-dimensional infinity should not dwarf 3-dimensional infinity, so that perhaps our 3-D calculation is but a grain of sand to an 11-dimensional being? Georg Cantor discovered that there indeed are "sizes" of infinity, which he called "cardinality". The integers, for example, are an "aleph-null" cardinality, whereas the real numbers are an "aleph-one" cardinality that can swallow up all the integers just between 0.0 and 1.0.

So if the probability of our universe or winning the lottery is:

winning chances = (#-tickets-bought) /  (#-tickets-sold),
     or
probability = opportunities (= #-bought) * likelihood (= 1/#-sold).

This means that if, say, the likelihood of our universe in parameter space of physical constants is one in an aleph-null infinity of possibilities, it would take an aleph-one infinity of chances bought  in 11-D space to convert that to a probability of one. And if, perchance, "the existence of life" is the smaller likelihood of one in an aleph-one infinity of possibilities, then even buying an aleph-null infinity of universes as discussed in most multiverse-theories, would still result in a probability of precisely zero. Just because you buy an infinite number of tickets Mr Hawking, doesn't mean you will win the Cantor lottery.  [I have tried to make this argument more explicitly.]

Since all infinities are not created equal, Stenger and Hawking need to be very careful how they invoke infinity. And clearly multiverse-theory has chosen to ignore 100 years of work on transfinite numbers to make a claim that on its face is not defensible. But even if it were defensible, even if the infinities of multiverse-theory were large enough by some unspecified assumption to incorporate the improbabilities of our universe and the origin of life, the many other things hiding in those infinities should be very disconcerting. For if it is a tame infinity, then it does not accomplish what multiverse-theory wants, but if it is a wild infinity, it accomplishes far too much.

No, it is worse than that, for we have the worst of all possible worlds, we have harnessed the tame to combat the wild. If the anthropocentric fallacy gave away the keys, infinity now throws wide, very wide, the gates.

The Second-order Universe
Suppose multiverse-theory is right, infinity makes us all lucky, and we need no foresight nor planning to achieve life, for infinity delivers it into our hands.  Then we should also be able to survive merely by opening our mouth and waiting for fruit to fall in. Such a bountiful land it would seem, would remove all care and worry, for behold, all things are possible to those who believe!

Unless, of course, something else falls in our mouth first.

In this infinite universe where all things are possible, those that arrive fastest, win. Imagine, for a moment, that in a small box of randomly moving atoms, all possible arrangements will eventually be tested in infinite time. Then if one of those arrangements results in a brain, we will have consciousness and sentience and the power to prevent rearrangements of atoms. Furthermore, the accidental arrangement of a brain is far more likely than the accidental arrangement of a body and legs to go with it, since the more atoms we add to the system, the less likely it becomes. So in this infinite universe, we should see many more disembodied Boltzmann brains than extra-terrestrials.

But Boltzmann brains are merely a whimsical application of the idea that in an unstable or changing system, the winner is the fastest to the prize. In thermodynamics, this is known as the principle of maximum entropy production. In space plasma physics, we call it the fastest growing mode. The point is that in all these systems there are finite resources, be it energy or matter or matter-energy, resources are finite and therefore the one who takes them first prevents all other competitors from progressing. Winner takes all.

Let me recap the multiverse-theory logic again. In order to explain a most unusual distribution of matter and energy in our own universe, we hypothesize an infinite array of universes arranged as on a giant bingo card in the Grand Casino, where every possible solution is available somewhere. It is a theory that says everyone's a winner, and therefore none are special. But if the destination isn't so special any more, than the journey is. In such a reality, we have merely traded our special position for speciality of speed, traded x for dx/dt, replaced first order with second order.  We've allowed all modes to exist, and therefore the fastest growing mode dominates. 

And what is the fastest growing mode? Boltzmann brains are an example of a mode that is more probable than intact humans popping out of the void, but it isn't the fastest growing mode. If energy is the limited resource, then energy-gobbling modes will be the fastest. If information is a limited resource, then information sequestering modes will be the fastest. If the Grand Casino were an African savannah, then these modes would be the predators, and naive eco-sensitive conservationists the prey. If indeed the multiverse-theory be correct, then the vast array of worlds would be dominated by the Destroyers, the Devourers, the Shiva of universes, finding ever more ruthless ways to consume our energy, our matter, our information into the Great 11-dimensional Borg.

If we reject a personal God, if we reject a purpose to our universe, and call up the god Chaos, then we let loose a legion of demons who want what we have, only more so.

The Multivorous Gods
"Perhaps we are in a meaningless universe inhabited by demons, but can't we give as well as we get? Is not bravery on our side, the courage of facing the world as it is and imposing our will upon it? Did not Nietzsche describe it as the ubermensch, the superman?"

The Greeks had another name for it--hubris--and some credit it with causing the madness that afflicted Nietzsche for the last decade of his life. For the Greeks were right, the forces unleashed by this infinity of options are far greater than our limited human imagination or will can sustain. (Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.)

Since we have disallowed a personal God at the very beginning of this venture into multiverse-theory, and since we have let loose the 2nd order race to the prize in an infinity of solutions, what happens when a process--say, a rogue computer named HAL--begins to consume all the information it can find and follows a trajectory toward god-likeness? In infinite time, will it not contain infinite information and therefore our infinite universes must contain an infinite number of HAL-gods? Even before infinite time, will it not become smart enough that it is indistinguishable from the Biblical God? And could not such a super-intelligent being use the same physics of 11-dimensions to make as many "special" universes as it wanted, including ours? And would not this planned creation of universes be ever-so-much more likely than the Boltzmann brain version of our universe? Therefore doesn't multiverse-theory necessarily make a planned and purposeful creation not just probable but necessary?

Or suppose that in one of these universes the speed-of-light is so much faster than ours, that computers run billions of times faster than they do in ours. A silicon chip accidently formed on a heated asteroid, and before you can say Darwin, there's a supercomputer the size of a galaxy that can communicate with other multiverses, extract their data, store it, and expand its megalomaniacal desire to consume every bit of information that ever existed. Since we are limited by the bounds of our universe, our energy and matter is limited, but this Borg has no such limits, and with infinite time and infinite matter and infinite energy, it will spread ever faster until it consumes the multiverse. Who can doubt such a cosmic Shiva is inevitable? (See this comment on how the multiverse-theory is just the ontological proof of God's existence.)

"Whoa! Whoa!!" the multiverse-theorist complains, "Even these 2nd order phenomena must have speed limits!"

And what exactly might they be? Third-order limits? I know where that argument is headed--right down Hegel's infinite alley. But notice what multiverse-theory is doing: it begins by denying the first order existence of a personal creator, then it finds it has to deny the 2nd order progress toward a personal creator, or it is back to where it began. But progress is the whole point of Darwin, so how do we limit HAL without denying Darwin? And who enforces these limits? And are these limits themselves part of the Grand Casino of variables?  If so, then 2nd order equations can generate oscillations and smoke and mirrors and all sorts of non-intuitive results. WHAT A MESS!

Something else? Some sort of cosmic conscience, morality, logic that overrides the Cosmic Casino?  But didn't we call that "person" and "purpose"? If we are adamant that it not be person or purpose, then we are left with the loss of logic altogether. If infinite worlds do not produce what I logically deduce, then logic itself is one of the casualties of multiverse-theory.

And the great form of Atlas looms over Olympus ready to drop the world on us. Multiverse-theory leaves us quivering between two outcomes: the personal Creator God of the ontological proof; or the great Shiva Destroyer of worlds, the irrational Titanic forces, the frozen meaninglessness of the Frost Giants.

Beatrice
And so in our long journey through the purgatory of multiverse-theory, we discover as we previously discovered for materialism, there are two solutions, and only two. Either William Lane Craig is correct and multiverse-theory is just another ontological proof a personal Creator, or we follow Nietzsche into the dark nihilism of the loss of reason. Heaven or hell, there are no other solutions.

"How can this be? Did we not begin with an infinity of solutions, how then did we end up with only two?"

Because of feedback. When our solutions include us, then we have introduced unavoidable feedback. For positive feedback takes any number or even infinite inputs and returns just two outputs. It is the inevitable consequence of wanting to explain ourselves. If, as in most of our science endeavors, we leave out ourselves, our feelings, our metaphysics, our guilt, our pleasures and focus merely on the task at hand--say, building a better telescope--then we don't suffer this indignity. But as soon as we try to avoid something that is rightfully ours--our conscience, our responsibility, our will--then we are up to our neck in a mess.

What can deliver us from this metaphysical pit? Only another person, who isn't us. Only by having an outside force can we avoid the metaphysical feedback that unleashes the Titans. And only by making that force personal, is the cure any better than the disease. We need  a pure light, a simple truth, a thing of beauty, something outside our self to guide us through the minefield.

Pandora slammed the box shut, but it was too late, the only thing left in it was Hope.

(Part 1 here)

The Widow's Mite Fallacy
 In his debunking of fine-tuning, Stenger has fallen for the "Widow's Mite Fallacy". (I know, we all like to name things so we can use a stigma to beat a dogma.) It is explained in Mk 12:42, where Jesus is standing with his disciples near the entrance to the temple and the collection box. It's one of those trumpet-shaped devices they have in the grocery store that makes the coins fall for a long time, so a good handful of shekels makes a marvellous racket. The donors are being ostentatious with their shekels, when in comes a poor widow--no husband, black outfit, worn sandals--and drops in two copper coins that barely make a plink. Jesus turns to his disciples and says: Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living. The disciples were working in absolute monetary units, since of course, the maintenance of the temple was paid in absolute monetary units. But honor and esteem, Jesus said, needed to be awarded based on relative measures (which have no units), on percentages. And when properly renormalized, the widow is deserving of far more honor than the ostentatious rich.

The widows mite fallacy is confusing the absolute units of physics with the relative units of metaphysics. If we want to know whether the universe is fine-tuned, it does no good to say "It must be, because it is 13.7 billion lightyears in size!" We can't evaluate a purpose with a unit like a lightyear. But if we said, "Every other universe I've seen is only a few millimeters, but this one is ginormous!" then we have a calibration point, something we can make a ratio with, something that converts size into a unitless measure.

Now there are many possible calibration points, and Stenger plays some games with them to reduce the large numbers and make them appear boring. For example, if the ratio of electric to gravitational force of a hydrogen atom is calculated, there are 39 orders of magnitude difference. We are told if we adjust it even by a fraction of those 39 orders, then stars change their shape, burn up too rapidly or slowly, and life would be impossible. Stenger says, "Let me replace the mass of a proton and electron with corresponding Planck masses, and look, the ratio is 1. See, it wasn't so hard after all!" Stenger, of course, is playing fast and loose, because (a) the Planck mass is imaginary, no known particle has a Planck mass (b) the Planck mass is calculated by taking ratios of the same constants that appear in the ratio we began with, with the net result that all the constants vanish and we get a number close to one. Sorta like multiplying by the reciprocal, and equally vacuous. But most importantly, (c) his unitless ratio still has (mass) units in it! He is still trying to measure a metaphysical quantity with physical units! What we want to know is not "how big is your number?" but "what percentage is your number?"

But how do we properly convert these numbers to dimensionless percentages? How do we know if this dependence on 39 orders of magnitude difference is important or not? Is 39 orders of magnitude a shekel or a mite?

Bayesian Hypothesis Testing
Forty years ago, no one could tell if this was a shekel or a mite, because they would say "I can tell if it is likely by knowing the population from which it is randomly drawn." And since no one had a clue what that population was, or even what it means to be "randomly drawn", it was your best guess against mine. However in the past 20 years we have had a relatively new development in statistics, Bayesian hypothesis testing.

(It's a great story, and one that Stenger would never tell, how a Presbyterian minister named Thomas Bayes developed a form of statistics in the 18th century that was nearly universally ignored until in the 1960's a controversial physicist, Ed Jaynes, developed the theory to oppose the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics = QM weirdness. Why would Stenger avoid this story? Because Jaynes argues that the probabilities of QM reflect our knowledge, so that physics is not so much telling us what we know, but how much we don't know. Metaphysics, then, directly controls the numbers we get out of our physics, and not the other way around.)

In the old way of doing statistics, we plotted our data and fit it with a line (linear regression) or a polynomial, where there are supposed to be as many points scattered above as below, and the amount of scatter tells you how good it was (correlation). Every time you add in another free parameter, the fit gets better, regardless of whether it makes any sense. We were taught to show restraint in our extra parameters with some gobbledy-gook about an F-test, but in reality we looked around to see what the competition was doing and added one more variable than they just to get better fits than them. This is what Stenger is doing with his "fine-tuning" rebuttal when he starts doing 2- and 3-dimensional fits.

But in Bayesian hypothesis testing, we had to put in beforehand what we expected, and then compare the actual scatter with our prior expectations. Here's how it works. Suppose my theory predicts that universes can range in size from one nanolightsecond to 20 gigalightyears. Then when I plot the measurement of 13.7 +/- 0.1 gigalightyear for our universe, I can make a ratio of actual/predicted to find out how good my theory was. (Very poor at predicting.) If I add in another parameter, say, mass is predicted to be between 1 kg and 10^50 kg, and ours is some 10^47kg, then I have another ratio, which should be multiplied by the first one. (Even poorer.) This produces some square area (if I have 2 dimensions) that can be compared to all the allowable area on my graph.

Fine-tuning is the argument that the theory predicts a ginormous area is available, but the livable area is a microscopic fraction of that. The ratio of the areas is unitless and is related to the probability of it happening by accident (or whatever priors are used in the Bayesian model), so it gives the correct amount of "fine-tuning" in the appropriate metaphysical sense.

Stenger still doesn't like it.

He constructed this toy model he calls "MonkeyGod" with 3 (or 4) adjustable parameters, and tests it for "livability", for example, whether it produces stars that can live to be a billion years old. (A very crude proxy for "livability" and probably false.) What he shows is that some of the parameters are correlated, so if I up the gravitational pull, I also have to up the electrical repulsion to make a star. (On an Etch-a-Sketch, this is like making a diagonal line by twisting both knobs at the same time.) This means that instead of a square or hyper-cube of livable volume in our 4-D parameter space, we've got this hot-dog shape or even spaghetti shape of livable volume. Now that is still fine-tuning, we just need a little more sophistication to calculate the volume of the spaghetti compared to the bowl, but hey, that's what topologists are for.

So far, Stenger is in agreement (when he is talking to techies anyway) and shows a power-point plot of gravity-vs-electric force where a diagonal goes up the plot having 9% of the parameter space "livable". But 9% of what? 

Relative Relativity
What exactly is the allowable volume of the box? Stenger doesn't know, and as far as I can tell, no one else knows either. Oh they all seem to think they can find it, but no one actually explains the logic of their choice, so this whole endeavor to define fine-tuning might be intuitively obvious, but it isn't very quantitative.

Stenger apparently thinks that this can be done with Planck's constant, where he uses it as a way to renormalize his units. The idea is that there is this fundamental length scale of the universe, so sizes below a Planck-scale are undefined, just as Planck found that photon energies come in multiples of the Planck energy. To find new Planck units, one multiplies by other physical constants such as "c" the speed of light or "G" the gravitational constant, etc.

So Stenger and many before him put zero at one end of their parameter scale and some favorite Planck unit at the other end, and this is supposed to be the range of acceptable values for this physical constant--the Bayesian prior.

But remember, we're in the eleven-dimensional Great Casino of Life, where every physical constant gets to be changed randomly. Why are we treating Planck's constant as if it is special? For that matter, why is zero or the speed of light special, or even the unit of time? If everything can be changed including the Planck ratios, why do we think we know what the volume of the box should be a priori? And if we don't know the expected volume, we can't calculate the metaphysical ratio for fine-tuning. The mere idea of a box is a limitation that speaks of a higher-dimensional reality, and why should we assume that, and what metaphysical justification can we give for our choice?

To be really dumb about this, we have only observation of our own universe and no other. So perhaps we are looking for the wrong box. Perhaps we should be taking the ratio of the observed value of the physical constant divided by the range "how much can I perturb it and still be here". The numerator is given by every physics reference book. But the denominator becomes a test of our theories about life, which is changing all the time. So the ratio is the fine-tuning of our "life" expectations, which is a quantitative measure of our ignorance. At least that ratio doesn't depend on some unknown outer limits to 11-D space, and it would tell us how much we didn't know about this subject. Jaynes would be proud.

So we can get precision in this fine-tuning argument, but not from Stenger nor from the 11-D landscape multiverse theory. For Stenger's entire rebuttal of fine-tuning turns into a physical inability to establish metaphysical priors, to establish the volume of the box. Perhaps this is because he divides his units with Planck-units and thinks that these unitless ratios are physical when in fact they are metaphysical, but my suspicion is that he knows that this is an arbitrary rescaling, so he is equivocating intentionally.

Why am I so ungenerous? Because of repeated equivocation in his calculations. Replacing the proton mass with the Planck mass, for example, does not "explain" the 39 orders of magnitude difference in gravity and electricity because the Planck mass is defined to be the reciprocal of the thing he is trying to explain. Likewise, the Hawking calculation of the precision of the 10^60 Big Bang, he "explains" as a natural consequence of inflation, when in fact, inflation was invented to explain Hawking's problem, making it anything but "natural." He does this again with the vacuum point energy, deftly using quantities whose origin as "theoretical reciprocals" he carefully avoids mentioning, but which always miraculously scale the problem to 1. Speaking more generally, he is using a physical instantiation (say, the Planck mass) of a metaphysical entity (the bizarre ratio of forces) to supposedly remove the metaphysical consequences (fine-tuning) of a physical contingency (large numbers). The circularity is blatant, pervasive, and bald-faced.

But I've been merely quibbling over fine-tuning details with Stenger, I haven't yet explained why the 11-dimensional Grand Casino of Life is more like Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. The longer we play the slots, the longer our ears become. Intuitively Stenger knows this, which is why he drags out multiverses as a defense of last resort, but drag it out he does.

But it is no resort.

To be continued...

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and "multiverses", and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides no control, it produces no technology, it advances no mathematics, it is a science in name only, because it is really metaphysics.

In Stenger's first book, G-d: the failed hypothesis, he argues that Science is an independent and more reliable way to truth than metaphysics. And in his second book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, he argues that metaphysics (multiverse theory) is a more reliable guide than science (design-detection). With these two books then, we can get anything we want, except ethics. And metaphysics. And science.

Because I'm not advocating Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria. Nor do I say that metaphysics should not comment on science, I'm not a Russell devotee who abhors metaphysics and thinks that it corrupts physics, on the contrary I think metaphysics is essential for doing physics properly. And precisely because I think good physics requires good metaphysics, I believe in critiquing metaphysics to understand what it is saying about reality and our interaction with reality. For example, a Gnostic metaphysics that considers reality to be only spiritual will not endeavor to find the causes of disease or the medicines that cure it. This is why we didn't get our penicillin from Mary Baker Eddy, our Hippocratic oath from India, or our physiology from China. Am I saying that acupuncture doesn't work? No, I'm saying that focussing on the pain doesn't really solve the underlying cancer, so that there is a world of difference between defining disease as the perception of pain or the cause of pain. Likewise there is a world of difference between defining science as the perception of order or the cause of order. Multiverse-theory, like acupuncture, focuses on perception as reality, whereas theism focuses on perception as a result of reality. Acupuncture may feel good for a few minutes but ultimately fails to prevent death from a spreading cancer, whereas chemotherapy may feel bad for a few minutes but succeeds in permanent relief. Theism may be distasteful to the Enlightenment spirit of freedom, but succeeds in promoting the virtues of science, whereas multiverse-theory may give quick relief from the cognitive dissonance of Big Bang observations, but succumbs to the multiverse gods. And the multiverse gods, like the Hindu gods and the Chinese spirits, devour science and technology.

Therefore it is not a neutral matter whether multiverse-theory or theism provide the metaphysics behind our scientific endeavors. For if multiverse-theory succeeds, it destroys the very cause and creator of its existence--science. Now some will say that this is still a small price to pay for the freedom it provides from a creator-god. But I want to make it very clear what the terms of the exchange will be, because, to misquote Ben Franklin, those who exchange their security for freedom will get neither.

1) The History of the Contingency Conundrum
Let me begin with a little background for what motivates the multiverse endeavor. Going back to antiquity, there have been two answers to the questions "Where did the world come from?" or "Why is something rather than nothing?" or "Who is responsible for this mess?" The materialist, Epicurean, Democritean (and even Platonic) answer, is "Nowhere" "Nohow" and "No one". The world is here because it has always been here, it is eternal. And something exists just because it does. And there is no need to assign responsibility because the world has always been this way, get over it.  The alternate answer to these questions, is "Creator" "Creator" and "Creator". The world was made for the pleasure of the creator who is also responsible for it--an answer which leads us into theism and various flavors thereof.

Let me be a bit more abstract and say that the first answer assigns eternality to impersonal stuff, whereas the second answer assigns eternality to personal being(s). There really aren't any other possibilities, either the universe is a result of a person, or it is self-generated without purpose and person. I flat-out reject dualist views which have some personal spiritual dimension alongside an impersonal material dimension, sort of like Plato's Demiurge shaping the eternal Matter. Which came first Plato, the Matter or the Demiurge? Because if we don't say which is most important, then we will spend the rest of our lives arguing over who is responsible for this mess. If we incorporate some ambiguity in our definitions, we will never achieve clarity in anything derived from them.

Both personal and impersonal answers are equally consistent (that is, if we grant the impersonalist a personal opinion), but both are not equally useful. The impersonal answer will have a great deal of difficulty explaining where persons came from or whether they even exist and can be held morally responsible etc. The personal answer will have difficulty with analyzing persons in an impersonally, whether it be physiology, medicine or psychology, there will be a tendency to personalize things that are entirely mechanical and determinative. Therefore the history of the rise of science in the West is perhaps one of tension between these two views, both contributing to what we presently call Science. We might even say that the current tension of post-modernism is the withdrawal of the personal exemption that had earlier been granted to the materialist.

For modern Science has not been kind to the impersonal view, because evidence for a beginning has continued to build in whatever paradigm he chose. When Newtonian physics (which was a triumph for materialist atomism) found the universe to be unstable to the attraction of gravity, Newton himself suggested that God tweaks the planets and stars back into line. Even this tweaking, however, could not resolve Olber's paradox in which an eternal heavens should fill the night sky with infinite stars, making not just the night sky white, but the Earth in temperature equilibrium with them. Einstein's equations resolved the difficulty by positing a beginning when space began in a cosmic explosion, but at the cost of also demanding a beginning to time. Thus the triumph of materialism in the physics of Newton was dashed by the defeat of eternity in the physics of Einstein. The final nail in Newton's eternal space was the discovery of the blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang. And since there are only two answers to the fundamental metaphysical question, we must now all admit the materialist was wrong, there is a Creation.

But only with great reluctance will most physicists admit to a Creator.

How can one have a Creation without a Creator? With great difficulty, and multiverse-theory is merely the latest in a series of materialist proposals since 1961 that have attempted to undo the damage caused by the downfall of eternity. Their goal is to get back this impersonal universe by converting the creator into a force and abstracting it as an eternally existent impersonal thing. Thus for "eternal matter" they exchange "eternal force" in order to recover all the benefits of materialism, merely singed, as it were, by the fires of the Big Bang. I list these failed efforts here, not because they disprove multiverse-theory, but because they explain why multiverse-theory, despite its wild hair and even wilder eyes, has become the poster child for materialism.

First, the most obvious solution was to add some subtlety to the Big Bang observations that made it all a case of mistaken identity. Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold proposed that the universe only appears to have a starting point, when it is in fact eternally expanding as hydrogen is created out of the vacuum continuously. This "steady-state" solution lost credence when cosmic background radiation was first discovered, and later when protons were found not to decay. Nor did Hubble photographs of distant galaxies look anything like ours as Hoyle's theory predicted, and finally, echoes of the Big Bang were found in the surveys of the background cosmic microwaves. No prediction of Hoyle's model worked, every prediction of the "creation" model was verified.

A second solution was to say that the creation may have occurred, but it was a "cyclic creation" that has been going on eternally. Everything is flying apart, but at some future point it will come back together and then fly apart again, and this cycle will continue forever. This view was popular until Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose showed that once the universe shrinks enough, it will collapse unavoidably into a black hole with no rebound. Thus the cycle will last only once, and time will end forever. Furthermore, the amount of matter needed to reverse the expansion of our present universe is not observed. Even more peculiarly, measurements of the universe to detect whether we have too much matter and collapse or too little and expand reveal we are on the knife edge of improbable "just right" between the two.  Rather than discover how we can recover eternity, we now know it had not just a beginning, but a very, very special beginning. Hawking first tried to sidestep this problem in his Brief History of Time by claiming that in imaginary time the beginning is also imaginary, but in more recent publications has abandonned this arcane logic and now claims that multiverses solve the problem. Other, less popular solutions, include a quantum-string theory that suggests super-duper-microscopic strings are more powerful than black holes and can cause the Big Crunch to become the Big Bounce, but even in such speculative theories there's no answer for the loss of entropy such a system would necessarily entail. (Stenger's entropy solution potentially only works for expanding universes, so it cannot explain cyclic universes. Further, I would argue, its a "formal" solution that is an artifact of his definitions for the metric, rather than an observed property of nature.)

But now materialists have an even bigger problem than losing eternity, they have a creation that shows the fingerprints of a creator, because it is a very special Big Bang that is neither too loud nor too soft--Hawking calculated the tuning as one part in 10^60, or a grain of salt more or less would have made our universe uninhabitable. Now remember, in an impersonal universe, explanations can have two causes and only two--law and chance. So either that fine tuning was a law, or it was chance. The sheer improbability of it seems to tell us it wasn't chance, and this left all materialists scrambling to find a law that would make it all necessary. The one thing they were sure it could not be is contingent, the product of purpose, designed, personal.

Now mind you, the materialist has lost the battle for eternity, he is grudgingly acknowledging a creation, so he is now fighting a rear guard action over the nature of the creator. Did the creator design this creation, or can a materialist claim a partial victory by showing the creator was stupid, clumsy, and maybe even impersonal? I call it a partial victory, because Stenger/Dawkins/Darwin give away the farm when they make a theological argument to deny theology--arguing that something in the universe is too stupid/evil/dumb to be the result of a wise and caring creator, and therefore the creator doesn't exist. But my goal in this post is not to point out the metaphysical inconsistencies of the materialist, which others have done so much better than I, but to elaborate the metaphysical consequences of the approach.

So the third solution was an attempt to show that the universe was not carefully tuned. There's more matter than can be seen with the telescope, so perhaps the Big Bang was indeed too loud or too soft to be well designed. However the more sophisticated these searches became, the more finely tuned the universe was found to be. Brandon Carter published a book about all these fine tunings, and called the near miraculous state of our universe the "Anthropic Principle", the universe had to be this way for us to discover it. Guillermo Gonzales "Privileged Planet" is one of many books that adds to the list. Not only was the Big Bang finely tuned, but so was the ratio of the proton mass to electron mass, the fine structure constant, the gravitational energy to the electrical energy, and so forth, all could not be adjusted much from their presently observed values without making life impossible. (Stenger's second book takes issue with several of these items, but we note that the burden of proof is on Stenger to explain all fine-tunings as chance and law, which he has not done, because it is he that is intolerable of design, not the design-finders who are intolerant of law and chance.)

This was making a bad situation worse, so a fourth solution was attempted to discover a law that explained the fine tuning, a law that removed the contingency, the design, the purpose from the creation. Alan Guth suggested that there is a mysterious particle called the "inflaton" which made the universe expand faster than the speed of light, and so "smoothed" the Big Bang into its present delicate balance between too loud and too soft. For such a speculative theory, it was amazing how quickly "inflation" models swept through the community. Soon every cosmologist was developing some aspect of inflation. Unfortunately, the initial predictions were falsified, and the theory went through several revisions. The present third or fourth generation inflation theories have "slow roll" inflaton whose properties must be specified more precisely than the 1:10^60 of the original Big Bang. That is to say, the cure is worse than the disease.

Furthermore, the inflaton does not explain any of the other contingencies discussed in the Anthropic Principle--the finely tuned physical constants that have no underlying law to explain their precision values. Not only have we lost Chance to contingency, but we have lost Law as well. To sum up, first the materialists lost Eternity, then they lost Chance, now Law and so they are left with a Creation having distinct fingerprints of a Creator. Everything they tried has only made things worse. What can be done to recover an impersonal universe? What does Stenger do? Awaken the chaos gods, the Frost Giants, the Titans whose sheer power could overwhelm the rational Olympians.

The Great Casino of Life--buy your multiverse chips here
If contingency implies design, then obviously one has to remove the contingency to remove the proof of design. The search for a Law revealed that any hypothetical Law would be as equally contingent as the one it replaced, possibly more so. (In hindsight, this is what every child discovers when he asks his mother "Why?" too many times and is told "Because I said so!") This is scary, and the community abandoned this approach in a big hurry. But an alternate approach to explaining why, say, the lottery was won three times in a row, is to demonstrate that the winner bought up 90% of all the lottery tickets. And if we could demonstrate that the winner purchased 99.9% of all the lottery tickets, that would be even better. So in order to make this highly contingent improbable creation completely understandable, we need only assume that there is a huge lottery of universes and we are the lucky winners.

Not that this is an easy thing to do, after all, we need at a minimum 10^60 tickets to resolve the Big Bang expansion lottery, not to mention 10^100 tickets to resolve the vacuum energy fine tuning, and on it goes. If we toss the accidental origin of life into the lottery, we are in excess of 10^40,000 tickets that have to be bought. Such a number is getting too large for mere mortals to explain, so materialists resort to that last refuge of scoundrels and haven of mystics--infinity.

If there are an infinite number of lottery tickets sold, then we can all be winners!

Uh, or is that losers? It all depends on the way the lottery is run. If our chances are 1/(#-tickets-sold), then increasing the number of tickets assures us we will never win. On the other hand, if our luck is  (#-tickets-sold) times (small-chance-of-winning) then increasing the number of tickets will make us certain winners. Which is it?  

This "all winners" hypothesis obviously requires some ancillary assumptions, but for a materialist discovering more and more fingerprints of a creator, desperate straits require desperate actions. Throwing caution to the winds, then, materialists have thrown in their lot with a seedy lot of applied mathematicians who have been desperately trying to convince physicists that eleven dimensional space is somehow as real as the four spacetime dimensions we've grown to know and love. In this weird "landscape" stolen from Stanley Kubrick's 2001 movie, every possible universe of 4-D physics laws is erupting via quantum-mechanical fluctuations from the 11-D space, being tested by some divine Chaotic god for evolutionary fitness and discarded if found wanting. It is a giant lottery operating in an infinite space for infinite time, so it is certain to find our finite little universe and put us into it.

The assumptions are rather staggering, actually, but here are a few of them: (a) Our universe has zero energy, since matter and gravity have opposite sign; (b) QM fluctuations of zero energy can create new universes (out of nothing, but where is nothing?); (c) The creation of new universes produces a randomization of the physical constants, sort of like mutations on genes; (d) This has been happening eternally.

Once again, these assumptions are mostly metaphysical, and certainly not experimentally determined. Some physicists have argued that (a)  is demonstrably false. Others have argued that (b) requires (a), which even if true, would diffuse distant starlight, which is not observed. Why (c) would be true is beyond my comprehension, since Stenger himself says that the "fine-tuning" is merely an artifact of units, so wouldn't randomization of these units be an artifact of an artifact? How do I know that every baby universe I spawn doesn't have exactly the same bad value for the fine-structure constant that prevents life? And (d) is merely contradicting everything we've learned from Big Bang theory without proof--it is merely the reintroduction of the materialism that we were supposed to be proving, making everything else mere distraction from this sleight-of-hand that replaces Creation with Eternity.

But again, my goal is not to critique the dubious metaphysical assumptions of the theory, but to draw out the metaphysical consequences of the theory. I can forgive the adoption of bad assumptions, all of us have done this one time or another, but I cannot forgive the Pandora's box of bad consequences released.

To be continued...
  

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) got a big boost from obscure nerddom by the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster. Based on real life, the world's biggest radio telescope in Puerto Rico would permit a few hours every month for listening for aliens, but it really wasn't very much time, and after a few decades of not hearing anything, despite the absolutely brilliant innovation of having screensavers around the world processing the SETI data with SETI@Home, Arecibo was giving even less time. So the movie wasn't just a hit with the box-office, it also was a hit for SETI funding, with multi-billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, chipping in a cool $13M to build forty-two 20-foot radio dishes to listen for aliens, positioned just west of San Francisco (where else?)  Now a 10 foot dish is what us oldtimers remember as the size needed to get decent satellite TV out in the boonies, so Allen is doubling the size to increase the signal by 4, and multiplying the number of directions to cover most of the sky, achieving 168 times the reception of that rusting yard monster.

And just like us, despite all those channels, there's still nothing worth watching.

So after decades of bad programming, combined with the fallout of California dreaming, we finally see cutbacks in all those cushy jobs at UC Berkeley that used to analyze data from Allen's SETI array, and we suddenly get the announcement that SETI is off the air. Now those of us that think there is already far too much noise in science will heave a sigh of relief that a few more GBytes per day will not flood the internet, but what was the point of these impassioned pleas for funds to detect starving aliens? Quoting from their register-only newsletter:

What if an alien intelligence is calling us from a distant planet and we have the phone off the hook?
YOU are needed NOW to revive the search for other intelligent life in the universe...

 Do we really want a $13M facility just sitting there idle for lack of funds to stream bits?

If only.

When you consider just how many security cameras are available on the Internet for free download you begin to realize that it costs nothing to pump those bits into the vast cloud of bitland, and almost nothing for, say, Google to store them in a free e-mail account. So whether we give SETI funds or not, it costs them nothing but the electricity to pump out those bits, at oh, $0.30/kwh, where each telescope uses a few hundred watts, so we're talking a few dollars a day. The whole array running off of California's ultra-expensive carbon-neutral wind power could still be had at the astonishing value of $1/TByte, which compared to those jobs over at UCB around $150k/year, could run the entire array for a year on one sick day's salary.

So what was the point of this announcement? Clearly intended to put the fear of God or aliens or something into us. Sort of like threatening to shut down the government, except more useless.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure that all those SETI researchers were doing other valuable things with the data beside looking for alien communications. But funding radio telescope science isn't nearly as sexy, and anyway, the NSF already has a radio-telescope budget, which goes mostly to the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The dirty secret was that SETI was just another way to fund radio-telescope science without the oversight of NSF. But if they weren't going to be able to keep their desks at UCB, why they weren't going to share those darn bits either!

Should we care?

I mean, let's suppose the worst: suppose aliens have been trying to contact us for 2000 years and they keep getting a busy signal. If only Allen's array were fully funded, we would have heard from them by now, and surely aliens would have helped us solve global warming, world peace, global pollution, and the national debt. Or would they?

Recently several thoughtful types have posted their skepticism as a continuation of Enrico Fermi's "paradox" that asks why SETI hasn't been successful in the past 50 years. The bullet-list version of their answer listed these possibilities:

  1. Few civilizations with radios exist because:
     a) Hard to evolve
     b) They blow themselves up
     c) There are cosmic "parasites" that destroy them
     d) Random stuff gets them--see 1.a
     e) Multiverses [no this isn't supposed to make sense]
 2. They exist but we can't find them because:
     a) Too few in our corner of the galaxy
     b) Space travel is too expensive
     c) Humans haven't looked long enough
 3. Radios don't work very well because:
     a) SETI hasn't figured out what to look for
     b) Civilizations don't use radio waves very long or often
     c) Aliens don't use radios
     d) A SETI conspiracy suppresses contact
 4. Aliens don't like us
     a) Smart people don't talk much (See Proverbs)
     b) Earth is under quarantine (see CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet)
     c) Broadcasting is dangerous (see 1.c)
     d) Aliens are wallflowers
     e) Aliens can't communicate to humans because they're alien
     f) Aliens are luddites and hate radios
  5. Aliens don't want to be noticed because:
     a) They survive longer that way
     b) They have nefarious plans for us

In an earlier blog where I commented on Paul Davies' book "Eerie Silence", I suggested that 3.c was an obvious answer, but that 3.d was an equally good answer to Davies puzzlement, because "looking for alien communication" is indistinguishable from "searching for intelligent design". So the conspiracy is that we already have evidence of intelligent design, and SETI along with 99% of the science establishment, is busy ignoring it.

But there is yet another answer to this Fermi Paradox. Suppose that aliens have come and left some advanced radios for use in contacting them. Yup, the plot of 2001 Space Odyssey or even Arthur C Clarke's later story, Childhood's End. Then the lack of SETI-success may turn out to be that we haven't found these advanced radios yet, or we found them but there's a SETI conspiracy, or that multiple alien civilizations are competing for our attention and jamming the signal, or even that they heard us but there are reasons aliens prefer silence.

Let's just imagine--since lack of imagination is my biggest complaint with SETI--that aliens arrived on Earth some 1 million years ago and embedded a quantum radio in our DNA that gets turned on whenever we think deeply about the roots of negative numbers. It never was noticed before, but suddenly in the 20th century people are having mystic experiences in math classes, and several new religions have sprung up including a revival of the Pythagorean Society. Movies like A Beautiful Mind are smash hits at the box office, and a black-program is begun by the Army to design a more reliable alien radio. At the same time, the human genome project notices that there are secret messages encoded into junk DNA, and the cat is out of the bag. Is this SETI scenario really so far fetched?

The point is that communication is information, so detecting aliens is the same problem as detecting information. But information is independent of the material carrier. So it wouldn't really matter if it were modulated radio waves, gamma rays, or gravitational waves, water waves, even stadium waves, as long as the carrier had a signal. In fact, the carrier might not even be known--sort of like the link between solar output and climate change--where all we have is the correlations, but not the mechanism.

So why is it that hearing voices on a modulated radio wave from a pulsar would be evidence for aliens but hearing voices in our head telling us to look at a pulsar is not evidence? And if we assume that "hearing voices in our head" really is a dangerous thing, then haven't we made some sort of evaluation of what to expect of aliens? In fact, by analyzing how cultures in the past 3000 years have handled the common occurrence of "hearing voices", don't we have a culturally relevant if not millennial co-existence with aliens?  And the experience has been overwhelmingly negative.

Given this enormous data set from every culture over the past 30 centuries, the Eerie Silence isn't so eerie any more, and furthermore, we know a great deal about aliens if only by the various counter-measures that society has employed over the centuries to innoculate the population. Yes, I'm now repeating the plot from CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength.

My point is to show that SETI has always been with us, and that it has previously been called religion. I'm inclined to agree with Edmund Burke, that it would be the better part of valor to not dismiss the lessons learned through many previous generations. St Paul calls this humility "charity" because without it, all the knowledge in the world is worse than useless, it is downright dangerous. SETI is the recognition that everything we do, everything we learn is part of a bigger whole, a bigger purpose. Whether we be "secular humanists" or "religious fanatics," we need a unifying principle, a theory of knowledge, and SETI makes theirs very explicit.

So we come back to this SETI institute threat to shut down unless donors fork over the funds. It is as religious a plea as ever Oral Roberts ever issued from his university in Tulsa. It is as natural to associate aliens with beneficent beings as it is voices in our head with demons. But it makes a lousy way to finance a scientific endeavor.

Strangely enough, "wimpy" was early 20th century British slang for a hamburger, which somewhere in the 1930's became American slang for an ineffectual person, to the consternation of the OED. My kids, courtesy of Dollar Tree, have been exposed to pre-WWII Popeye cartoons, in which a character named "Wimpy" has a British accent and an addiction to hamburgers. He also accomplishes a lot while appearing quite ineffectual, getting Popeye to do all the hard work for him. If we view Popeye as a stereotype for the US, many of these pre-WWII cartoons can be reinterpreted as complex political commentary. Commentary that now extends to cosmology and astrophysics.

When cosmologists could not explain why galaxies formed out of the the hot gas of the Big Bang, they proposed a mysterious "dark matter" that was attracting the gas and making stars, but was itself invisible to telescopes. Two possibilities presented themselves: the matter was invisible to telescopes because it was "dark"; and the matter was invisible to telescopes because it was transparent.

Candidates for "dark matter" include comets (since the 1986 Halley mission discovered comets to be blacker than coal soot), black holes (obviously) and "hot Jupiters/brown dwarfs" (which are gas-blobs too small to become stars, because a certain critical mass is needed to start the fires of nuclear fusion that light up stars.) One thing that dark matter cannot be, however, is dust and gas, because even though these are dark, they would obscure the light behind them, and we'd see them by their absorbtion. So ordinary matter that remains unobservable has to be bigger than a pea and smaller than a star. Comets fit right in the middle of this range very nicely.

Similar requirements apply to black holes. Recently, we have used "gravitational lensing" by black holes to see the distortion of background stars and galaxies caused by strong gravitational fields around black holes. So if the black holes get bigger than a few suns in mass, we'd be able to see them too. Likewise, if a black hole was orbiting a normal star, it would tear the normal star apart and x-rays would come out of this "binary accreting object", so there's an upper limit on the occurrence of star-like black holes as well. And of course, there's the (yet unobserved) Hawking radiation from itty-bitty black holes that are so small they can "evaporate". So once again, black hole candidate dark matter has to be bigger than a pea and smaller than a star.

One place that perhaps these sized black-holes might exist, or brown-dwarfs might exist without being easily noticed is in the "halo" or "bulge" which is in the center of most spiral galaxies. The advantage of this location is that it is "hotter" than the disk, unlikely to form pairs of accreting binaries that would light up in the x-ray, and yet still provide the "missing mass" to form galaxies.

The alternative theory is that this dark matter is really transparent. So there is plenty there, but the photons that come to a telescope on the Earth have passed right through them without detecting them. Some examples of transparent matter are "neutrinos", which are particles that can pass completely through the Earth without hardly noticing. For that matter, it is estimated that 100 million neutrinos from the Sun are passing through your body every second without you noticing. Then how do we know how many are there? Simple. Every time two hydrogen atoms combine in the Sun to make deuterium--the fusion process that makes most of the energy in the center of the sun--a neutrino is emitted "to conserve the number of leptons". Since we can calculate the number of protons per second needed to power the Sun, we can calculate the number of neutrinos emitted as well, and it comes out to that 100 million per square meter per second at the orbit of the Earth.

Well if we know so much about neutrinos, why are we looking for some other dark matter? Well, because the one thing we don't know about neutrinos is how much they weigh. Right now, it looks like even those 100 million per square meter going through you each second multiplied by the thirteen billion year age of the universe and the quintillion square meters at Earth orbit, still don't weigh enough to make the galaxies form. So theorists have been inventing more neutrino-like particles that might weigh more. As it turns out, this is what all the famous theorists were doing in the 1930's, calculating masses of particles for their jobs at atom-smasher laboratories making ever better measurements. Three-quarters of a century later, having measured just about every subatomic particle that we could make in the "particle accelerators", theorists continue to be trained and continue to look for vanishing jobs calculating particle masses. So it was a natural fit for them to move on to cosmology and dark matter. The advantage of cosmology over atom-smashers, is that no government can build a particle accelerator as big or as efficient as a black hole not to mention the Big Bang, so theorists have no limitations in energy and can hypothesize particles that correspond to Terra and Atto electron volts.

Well, as with most things that require government funding, you need a catchy name. The name settled upon by this community wasn't "transparent dark matter" or even "clear matter", but the acronym "weakly interacting massive particles" or WIMPs. Perhaps it was self-parody, because the theorists were always a sort of ineffectual branch of physics that leached off the funding of the experimental halls filled with tons of iron and magnets and miles of copper cables. The atom smashers were million-to-billion dollar facilities, they were the popeyes of physics, and theorists followed them around looking for a few hamburgers.

It must have been successful, because the "dark matter" astronomical community had to respond to this turf invasion by the transparent theorists. They decided on the acronym "Massive Compact Halo Objects" or MACHOs. I don't know if this was self-parody or not, but given that the science community has all decided to back WIMPs, it must not have been too effective.

Well, neutrino detectors have been built and rebuilt ever bigger and better. One of the first was an old gold mine filled with vats of dry-cleaning fluid, tetra-chloro-methane, which recently got upgraded by paying the Homestake mine to keep the pumps going that keep it from flooding. Unfortunately, the wooden timbers caught fire last month, and it isn't clear if the mine is still safe for science. The next oldest detector was a huge swimming pool of purified water lined with glass phototubes (which look like old TV tubes). It was designed to see if every once in a great while a proton would decay (it didn't) and was later converted into a neutrino detector. This was so successful it was enlarged several times, and even refurbished when a technician changing bulbs from a rowboat accidently broke one, causing it to implode, which started a runaway chain reaction. (Yeah, way better than the mousetraps and ping-pong ball demo from freshman physics class!) This led to undersea detector arrays off the coast of Hawaii and France, which worked great but the distractions, I mean noise, limited the measurements. Now they have built a cubic kilometer-sized array in the ice at the South Pole of Antarctica, where the distractions are a lot less troublesome.  And while they still see some of those neutrinos from the Sun, they don't see any neutrinos that should be coming from Gamma Ray Bursts.

Water is easy for making detectors from, but some of these theorists said we need special materials. The chlorine in the Homestake mine, for example, mutates into Argon when it captures a neutrino, and this is supposed to be way more sensitive than water. So a competing experiment involved a special isotope of Xenon also stored in vats underground, in this case, the Gran Sasso tunnel under the Alps. It too, measured nothing. So we have had 20 or 30 years of WIMP searches, and other than the Sun's output of "normal" neutrinos, we really haven't seen a supply of massive transparent particles.

What does this mean?

Ahh. Finally we get to a question that we really should have thought about earlier. Why should a WIMP model be superior to a MACHO model? What motivates a particle-theorist's model over an astronomer's?

If you ask a theorist, they will start going on about spontaneous-symmetry breaking and the laws of nature considered as malleable clay. They say they can introduce a fifth force that only operates in the micron-scale or the parsec scale, and this force would explain the universe and galaxies and 42 (and bring them fame and glory). "But why?" you might ask, "do you need to introduce a fifth force? What is more elegant about your theory than the current one?" At this point, most theorists will cite papers and proposals and conferences, which is to say, "Everybody else is looking for them, so I'm contributing by joining the crowd." A really good theorist might point to the deeper symmetries of "super-symmetry" and try to convince you that it is more elegant to multiply the 100 or more sub-atomic particles by a factor of 2 or 3 to accomplish the same thing (explain the universe) but with more rules. I would consider this "lack-of-symmetry" but then they also probably voted for Obama.

But what most of them would admit if pressed, is that the present model is failing to account for observations and this is a crying shame. "What is shameful about the present model?" you might press. And if they were honest, they would say that it requires such fine tuning, that it seems to violate the idea that the universe was necessary, self-created and simple, but instead all this fine-tuning seems to say the universe was contingent, not autonomous, but complex, possessing information. In other words, this whole search for WIMPs is a way of denying design.

So why am I so skeptical of WIMP experiments? Not just because I think the standard model does a really good job of describing reality, and not just because ad hoc modifications of a theory are deeply unsatisfying, and not just because everyone goes about modifying the theory in exactly the same manner, but because no one considers what motivated Einstein's special theory, what Dirac called "mathematical elegance", what theologians call "design." Oh, and I also think MACHO comets do a great job describing the origin-of-life and galaxy formation. It's a two-fer. Sort of like spinach.

I'd like to think that the science establishment at their best is like Wimpy, following the hamburgers, but at their worst they are Bluto, bullying the opposition. The real reason I prefer MACHOs is because I'm strictly a red-blooded, patriotic Popeye fan.

(Part 3 in three-part series. In Part 1 we discussed how NASA had chosen a schizophrenic approach to life on Mars. In Part 2 we discussed how Hoover's ET paper destroyed their control of the narrative, as well as discomfitted many Darwinists. In this final part of the series, we look at how NASA has attempted to regain control of the ET narrative while making it comfortable for Darwinists again.

But wait, these NASA types are all members of the Mars Society. Why am I confusing them with Darwinists?

[You must read CS Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, to understand the connection between planetary "manifest destiny" and a cosmological "social darwinism." Lewis' is the best book I know to describe the complex interaction between the funding of NASA's manned exploration, Mars life, and Darwinist religion. This is not to say that anyone interested in Mars is an atheist, clearly the hero of Lewis' book wasn't, but it identifies some of the dogma that makes the Mars Society people, well, a bit like religious nuts. Lewis wrote that 75 years ago when National Socialism was at its peak--talk about prophetic! The key phrase that indicates you are on Darwinist hallowed ground is "Origin Of Life" (OOL). It is the greatest unproven assumption of Darwin's theory, and code for a burning bush experience.]

After devoting some time to answering critics of Hoover's work, the defenders of the Darwinist status quo, it would only be fair to give some time to Hoover's competition in the NASA Astrobiology division. They have published proceedings from a "roundtable," which I could only handle for about 20 minutes live. In this summary paper they outline their strategies for finding (and funding the search) ET. The contrast with Hoover, and the history of Viking give an important insight into the establishment NASA's modus operandi. But perhaps we should explain what is meant by astro+biology, since astro=latin for star, and stars have no biology!

It is simply a misnomer, where "extra-terrestrial" would have been a better term, or even the predecessor "exobiology", but unfortunately all these better terms carry baggage of their own. So rather than attempt to redefine a common word, NASA decided to coin their own term, where the connotations of "astro" were thought to be positive--astronomy, astrophysics, astrometrics etc. So who cares if it is an oxymoron, it was an unused word that allowed NASA to control the narrative. I know you are going to get tired of this really quick, but when sociologists advise the managers how to influence a publically-funded organization, the one thing they learned from National Socialism was that they had to control the narrative. Announcing an "Astrobiology Roundtable" then, means "finding all the scientists who are being paid by NASA funds or who want to be" to determine the sociological status quo and the future funding. Remembering this caveat will be the only way to make sense of the following discussion.

  NASA's Chris McKay Roundtable

Question One: What would you list as the most important opportunity for Astrobiology in planetary missions in the next decade?
Translation: What is the American public likely to get excited about and therefore justify the budget expense while being safe enough to avoid any undesirable failed expectations and loss of budget?
Subtext: How hard can we push NASA toward funding a risky undertaking?

Dirk: Mars life. (Redo Viking!)
Chris: Interesting. Why not Titan, like you used to say? (Regain control of the narrative.)
Dirk: Mars first, then big mission to Titan. (Because its obvious and cheap and do-able, unlike Titan.)
Penny: Ice. (Wherever you want to go, sweetie.)
Everett: Down deep. (More landers. Fund me!)
Chris: Interesting. Isn't it hard? (Get real.)
Everett: OK, in another decade. (And my graduate students.)
Alfonso: Mars. (Duh, wasn't this what we have said for the 30 years since Viking?)
Chris: Great. (Finally, the right answer!)
Inge: And Earth-based labwork. (Fund me!)
Chris: What about sample return? (Wanna nail that one shut before the loonies break our budget.)
Penny: Bad for planetary protection. (Defund them.)
Dirk: And Labelled Release* had a shelf-life. (Life was found, but had an expiration date. *see Part 1)
Inge: My suitcase is too small. Oh, and contamination. (Do I get an "A"?)
Penny: No refrigerator or mass spectrometer either. (Viking, what Viking?)

Question Two: What is the right balance between directly searching for life and investigations that focus on the physical environment providing a context for life?
Translation: How long can we pretend to search for life, (which if found would certainly tick off someone in the government), without getting in trouble for appearing ineffective?

Penny: Remember Viking.* (Labelled Release found life and we got in a lot of trouble for it. We can't afford to make that mistake again. We can't look for life. *see Part 1)
Everett: I know how to solve it--look for the chemistry of life rather than the biology of life. (Then we can placate everybody, skeptics and believers!)
Penny: But would the public buy it? (They might cut off our funding.)
Everett: Maybe.
Penny: No, they wouldn't. (Those plebes are so black-and-white, they think it's either life or nothing.)
Everett: Then don't call it life. (Take control of the narrative!)
Penny: Right. Don't call it "looking for life." (Whatever you do, don't lose control of the narrative.)
Everett: Or the fate of Viking may befall us...and we don't get funded for 20 more years! (Perish the thought!)
Penny: May it never be. (No more discussing searching-for-life missions.)

Chris: Does the Mars lesson apply to Titan? (Is this a universal prohibition?)
Dirk: No fear, we didn't even begin to look for life beyond Mars even if we knew what to look for. (And we won't even try!) But think of how well it would prove Darwinism! (The prohibition doesn't apply if it supports Darwin.)
Penny: Don't forget Europa and Enceladus! (Even more places we don't understand.)
Everett: Europa, yes. (Anything but Earth life.)
Chris: Should we be looking for biology at Enceladus? (How strong is the prohibition?)
Inge: We haven't got anything on Mars looking for life right now, perhaps we should look for life at Enceladus. (The prohibition doesn't apply to outer planets--[because biology there can't disprove Darwin?])
Dirk: NASA cut our "search-for-life-on-Europa" mission. (Don't underestimate the prohibition.)
Inge: I agree. (Prohibition is important.)

Chris: Are we done with "find-the-water-at-Mars" and ready to look for life again? (Has the prohibition expired in the 35 years since Viking?)
Alfonso: Yes we can look for life that is hiding in deserts and salt flats, optically. (Fund me!) But not sample return. (Not them!)
Chris: What about subsurface? (Fund Everett?)
Penny: Thirty feet deep is needed...or a cave. (We found some neat ones already!)
Everett: With water. (I assume the prohibition is lifted now.)
Penny: That's what I've been saying for 10 years. (Fund me!)
Everett: Yeah (me too.)
Penny: The hard part is landing. (It'll be a piece of cake. I promise.)
Chris: Everett, what do you think? (I'd like to fund you.)
Everett: Drilling is out. (Penny is right.)
Chris: Radar results? (Why isn't there funding for Penny?)
Penny: Data ignored. (I need a push from HQ to get funding!)
 
Question Three: Astrobiology is included in the Planetary Decadal Survey because Astrobiology is programmatically part of the Planetary program at NASA HQ. Is this the right approach? Does the Astrobiology Roadmap (promulgated by the NASA Astrobiology Institute) provide an important alternative?
Translation: How can our community get more funds out of NASA HQ?

Chris: What do you think of the HQ "Decadal Survey" roadmap?
Dirk: HQ funds too much biology--OOL & extremophiles--and not enough planetary. (Fund me!)
Chris: Maybe "Astrobiology" =HQ managers and not scientists. (Looks like bureaucracy is strangling science.)
Penny: We need each other. I'm part of the management, and scientists need to listen more. (Funding is political, get used to it.)
Chris: Everett?
Everett: Scientists can contribute. (Don't put me on the spot!)
Chris: Alfonso?
Alfonso: I, along with most in the Astrobiology community, were astonished when HQ said there was a prohibition on searching-for-life-on-Mars. They had no idea it was forbidden. But Earth OOL shouldn't keep us from searching for Mars life! Separate the goals. (I'm too young to remember Viking. The prohibition is Darwinist, and Astrobiology supports Darwin, it doesn't undermine it!)
Inge: The 2002 HQ document gives even less time to Astrobiology than the present one. But Alfonso is wrong, Astrobiology should do both OOL and search-for-life. (I too, do not remember Viking.)

So the roundtable was all about controlling the narrative on Mars, not-searching-for-life while claiming the opposite in order to keep the "Viking prohibition." The younger scientists, represented by Alfonso and Inge, are terribly confused by this prohibition, and think it is somehow related to the OOL problem. They don't remember Viking egos and the careers that littered the floor. It may be related to OOL, but that isn't how it started.

Who made the Viking prohibition? It looks like Sagan, who bequeathed it to the science hierarchy at NASA HQ, perhaps by linking it to Darwinist OOL. That is, even saint Sagan couldn't keep Gil Levin from getting the Nobel Prize merely by demanding it, he had to bring in theology, and there is no greater sin than denying Darwin. So his argument, and I'm speculating wildly here, was that Darwin requires life on Mars to have originated (OOL) independently of Earth, and therefore it must be weirder than Earth life. If Levin were to be awarded the Nobel for a sanitation engineering experiment, then it would prove Mars life was identical to Earth, which would contradict Darwin, and open the floodgates to Darwin deniers and other panspermia-promoters like Hoover. So in the name of OOL, Levin must be prevented from getting the Nobel by controlling the narrative--no biology experiment based on Earth life was valid for Mars, and hence NASA would not directly look for Martian biology. The ban was easy to implement because no one but NASA was going to Mars.

Sagan's gambit proved more permanent than Sagan himself, so for 35 years, NASA has assiduously avoided looking for life on Mars, lest in finding it, Levin be eligible for that Nobel, and panspermia escape its quarantine.

Will Hoover's paper push these over the brink--will it open up the opportunity to search for life? My guess is that they were waiting for Gil Levin, who is pushing 86, to die, but if the Nobel committee now sees Hoover's work as corroborating Levin, then NASA may be forced to wait for Hoover to die also. Hoover being only 65 means they are in a real conundrum, which is all the result of losing control of the narrative. The frustration is building all around, with NASA Astrobiology chafing at the bit of HQ, and NASA under real threat of being scooped by the European Space Agency (ESA) if they delay much longer, and the American public losing interest in funding Martian missions that keep not-looking for life.

Somewhere, someplace, Pasteur is laughing.

(Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 found here.)

Richard Hoover
Despite NASA's attempt to "control the narrative" on ET, it was Hoover's paper in the Journal of Cosmology that received 18,000,000 hits in two weeks, making his ET debut a case of "going viral". Even the staid SPIE where Hoover's annual conference on Astrobiology publishes his work as conference proceedings, (and charges a cool $18 for each downloaded PDF of Hoover's earlier publications on microbial meteoritic fossils), were so happy with the income they want to advertise the 14th annual conference this year. NASA, on the other hand, initially said some rather uncomplimentary things about their star scientist, and then has gone strangely quiet.

My biology colleagues in academia want to know if the paper is for real. "Why isn't NASA promoting it, if it is true that they have discovered ET?" The answer, of course, lies in the strange behavior of Mr Hyde.

After the initial blustering and misinformation about Hoover's credentials and past history, 18 million blog hits and over 150 requests for interviews, Hoover will be more widely seen in the media defending his paper. In addition there has been a rather nasty blog attack on both his person and work, mostly by people who know neither. In part, this post is an attempt to rectify that omission. The encouraging news is that there has been almost no blogging or scientific refutation of Hoover's paper, unlike both the arsenic paper and the 1997 microfossils found on Martian meteorite ALH84001. Hoover has been thorough, maybe too thorough--it's a long paper.

So let me take the time to refute some of the objections that have been aired about this truly ground-breaking paper, beginning with Hoover himself.

1. Hoover doesn't have a PhD, so he can't be a scientist.
   It is true that Hoover never finished his PhD, which involved translating the advanced mathematical work of Bourbaki concerning general relativity into English. However in the early 60's, there were plenty of people who were offered NASA jobs before their PhD and jumped at the opportunity rather than delay the chance of being involved in the Moon shot. Hoover was one of them. Nevertheless, he was a NASA scientist, and in 1992 was awarded "NASA Scientist of the Year," a recognition rarely received by those who pursue mundane academic tracks with PhDs. It is a sign of the times that "diplomas" are now considered necessary, yet many of the PI's of the first generation of NASA scientists, (as well as most Victorian scientists), never obtained them.
   
   Yet even without the PhD, Hoover's credentials are both broad and deep, including inventions, patents, European recognition, covers of Science, and single-author articles in National Geographic. It is a career most academics can only envy, which may account for the vitriol about "not being a scientist". The Wikipedia bio has been improved, but early versions of it around March 9, 2011 were particularly revealing about the sort of envy Hoover inspires among academics.


2. Hoover's paper was rejected by International Journal of Astrobiology (IJA) so there must be something wrong with it.
   Well actually no, it wasn't rejected. They received the ~80 page paper in May 2007, and suggested that it be split into two sections, a review paper and a new results paper and be resubmitted. His wife's hospitalization with pneumonia, followed by two expeditions to Antarctica intervened, and in 2010 Hoover returned to the editing, finishing a 40-page review paper when he was informed that the editors at IJA had changed, possibly requiring a whole new cycle of reviews and editing. After considering his options, he resubmitted to the Journal of Cosmology (JOC), because, among other reasons, his colleagues liked it and assured him of a favorable reception. So IJA had never rejected his paper, they had merely asked that it be split. As far as I know, they are still awaiting the revised manuscript of the new results.


3. Hoover never got NASA permission for the JOC submission, so the paper obviously failed NASA standards.
   Actually Hoover requested and received NASA approval for the IJA 2010 submission, but when he decided to send it to JOC instead, he requested another form but was aked if it had changed. When he replied "not in content, only in the format of the references," he was verbally told that a separate JOC form wasn't necessary. So in effect, NASA has approved this exact paper twice, in writing for IJA, and verbally for JOC.


4. Hoover's paper was never properly peer-reviewed, so it can't be taken seriously.
   This is very similar to the Anthropogenic Global Warming defense that says no skeptic has had a peer reviewed paper accepted and then we get the Climategate e-mails where we see the shenanigans used to prevent skeptics from publishing. Given the ubiquity of Mr Hyde's deputies, I would not take this criticism very seriously. But in fact, the IJA reviewers did peer review the paper in its 80-page form, and were not hostile. Furthermore, the JOC had two complimentary peer reviews when they decided they needed 100 more (literally!) and sent off the paper to a total of 103 reviewers. Of course, this is guaranteed to undermine the embargo, and unsurprisingly the paper leaked, hence the premature Fox News press release. Nevertheless, most of those 103 reviewers, experts in their fields, did review the paper, and to my partial knowledge, none of them rejected it. If only all controversial papers had such support!


5. Hoover's paper was published in a second-rate journal, so it can't be taken seriously.
   This is sour grapes. I'm sorry, but if peer review is as perverted as Climategate reveals, then so is this "rating" of journals, which are even more pitifully corrupted by money, power and cliques. Science is not done by reputation, nor by authority, but by cold, objective repeatability. If Hoover's paper has merit, it will not matter a speck whether it was carried in Nature or in JOC. I have other strong feelings about Nature, but for the sake of my potential future career I will refrain from saying them.


6. If Hoover were correct, how come NASA won't support him?
   It's a mystery to us too. And while I love to speculate about conspiracy theories, the mendacity of humans is often all that is required. For one thing, Hoover's work crosses multiple disciplines, involving microbiology, algaology, meteoritics, paleontology, geology, geochronology, planetology and perhaps a smattering of biochemistry and physics. I have heard him give seminars to physicists who were insulted that he used latinate genus-specie names of his organisms because it exposed their ignorance, and they assumed it was some sort of one-upmanship. I'm sure the opposite occurred in a room full of biologists. It takes a humble person to be lectured by Hoover, since there are so many things he knows about widely separated fields that he is bound to lose all of his audience at least some of the time, and perhaps some of them all of the time. That effect appears to be what had afflicted Phil Plaitt, as well as many of Hoover's critics.
   
   But more than this is going on, because most of Hoover's supporters are European scientists. That is, something about Hoover's paper is especially disconcerting to Americans. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I tell people it has something to do with the Manhattan project. When US engineering students are working on their mandatory final project, they are supposed to work in groups. Communication skills are considered the most important skills an engineer learns, according to all engineering accreditation organizations. America does science like engineers, so the Apollo program, like the Manhattan project, could not have been done in Europe. This makes the individualistic, polymath Hoover not just a puzzle, but a pariah in an agency that is modelled on engineering.
   
   Of course, you are free to concoct your own conspiracy theories. For example, one could "follow the money," by quoting Upton Sinclair "It's hard to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it." NASA's planetary protection division depends on providing biological safety to NASA missions, and thus extraterrestrial life must be excluded at enormous cost, which makes Hoover's paper a painful wake-up call. (On the other hand, most of his ET are not The Andromeda Strain, but well-known and innocuous algae.) We could concoct many such conspiracies, and over a few drinks have often done so, but I haven't the time nor the imagination to make them compelling here since they serve mainly as afterdinner conversation. Paranoia is unproductive in life, but does excellent service in entertainment.


7. Wasn't it Carl Sagan who said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?" and the data in this paper is, well, not so very extraordinary.
   As we commented earlier, this statement of Sagan's is Orwellian doublespeak for saying "my theory is better than your theory". After all, who gets to decide what "extraordinary" means? In today's post-modern parlance, Sagan is just camouflaging his primary motive which is to retain control of the paradigm in the face of challengers. If, on the other hand, we take the usual scientific method of testing hypotheses, then Hoover's paper is amenable to repeatability, to confirmation, to extension (nano-SIMS would pin down the isotopic signatures of his structures, if we could convince someone to donate time on their machine), to prediction, and critically, to disproof. That is, even the rigorous conditions demanded by "verificational analysis" are satisfied, where the data must be validated as well as the theory potentially falsified.


8. The results could simply be a matter of misidentification of abiotic artifacts rather than biological fossils.
   This is usually fronted by non-microbiologists, or if they claim to be microbiologists, they are the theoretical sort who have no experience with microscopy. Hoover got his first microscope in 5th grade and immediately collected some pond scum to examine, therefore he has been microscopically studying blue-green algae for some 58 years. Before you suggest that he doesn't know what he is talking about, you had better have more experience under your belt.
   
   But even if, like Rosie, you claim that lots of abiotic stuff looks biological, then you had better explain why numerous European academicians who are experts in algae and bacteria have examined Hoover's photographs and agree with him that these are not just identifiably biological, but identifiable by genus and species.


9. Well if these are all so biological, why are there so few pictures of the many species and genera he claims to have discovered? Where's all the new data?
   A most perceptive question. If you recall from the introduction, this was the half of the IJA paper that was supposed to be a review. It republished only pictures that have previously appeared in SPIE proceedings. These are not Hoover's best or even the most comprehensive catalog of pictures. That's because he's putting them in his *really new* discovery paper, and copyright law doesn't let you reuse figures easily. The sulfur-bug from Ivuna was actually the best picture he had from the small sample of Ivuna he could analyze. Orgeuil is another matter altogether, and the topic of the forthcoming research paper.


10. Wouldn't recent contamination be a much more conservative explanation of these biofossils?
    Well it would if we could explain (a) how to make microfossils in the first place; (b) how to make them in, oh, the 12 hours it took to collect the meteorites and put them in storage; (c) how to eliminate 12 of the 20 essential amino acids from the meteorite; (d) how to reduce the nitrogen content of the fossils to below 0.5% when 15,000 year-old mammoth hair shows no loss of nitrogen; (e) how to make fossils from organisms last seen on Earth 400 million years ago; (f) how to make the fossils out of isotopically meteoritic material not found on Earth; (g) how to make fossils out of super soluble salts and then combine them with the meteoritic material in such a way as to make them appear intrinsic; (h) how to make fossils with 10nm "fibrils" exquisitely preserved; (i) how to make recent contamination fossils inside a well-formed "fusion crust" of sterile melted meteoritic material; etc. Well, you should just read the paper rather than my summary. My point is that we don't know how to do any of these things, so that a "contamination hypothesis" actually raises more questions than it answers. The simplest answer is that these really are indigenous microfossils from ancient extraterrestrial microorganisms.


11. What about those famous "contaminated meteorite" papers by E. Anders, or the recent claims by A. Steele?
    It is embarassing to talk about these papers, not because the contamination was irrelevant, but because a scientist wrote these obvious fakes, and another published them. Anders never disputed microfossils, he was disputing the total organic surveys of B. Nagy by "finding" a CI meteorite that had been altered with bits of straw and coal inserted in a hole drilled through the fusion crust. This would never fool a microscopist, but supposedly the wet chemistry assays of Nagy would have been fooled. However no further meteorites were ever found to be tampered with in any fashion, and this meteorite could have been contaminated by Anders himself, who had, shall we say, personal reasons for wanting to discredit Claus and Nagy.
    
    Steele, on the other hand, heard from Hoover that a poorly kept sample of the Murchison CI meteorite had been contaminated by a fungus Hoover had seen growing on the outer surface of it. Hoover says the fungus was obvious both to the light microscope and to the electron microscope, was living, and had a large nitrogen content. In other words, it looked nothing like a microfossil so he could serendipitously demonstrate what recent contamination looked like. Steele offered to identify the fungus and coauthor a paper, so Hoover sent him a sample of this fungus-invaded meteorite. Steele then published two abstracts without Hoover's name suggesting that he had discovered that all of Hoover's samples were contaminated with an unidentified fungus and could be discounted, and then subsequently took another job with an institution hostile to the idea of microfossils. Further speculation on Steele's motives gets classified under afterdinner conversation above, but the best rebuttal is Hoover's own papers on the biomarkers of recent contamination versus microfossils.
    
    Therefore there is no evidence in the published literature over the past 50 years for any recent contamination ever being confused with microfossils or vice versa. This should not be a concern for the skeptic.


12. But these infected meteorites can't be comets because we know comets have no liquid water, so they must be terrestrial, perhaps material blown out of a Chicxulub impact crater.
    Well, let's dispose of the first statement--the Stardust mission flew by a comet with an aerogel capture medium, and returned to Earth. Subsequent analysis of the material collected was announced today to require precipitation from low temperature liquid water. So apparently, comets have liquid water on them at least some of the time.
    
    On the other hand, carbonaceous chondrites are not like stony or rocky or iron-rich asteroids, which are thought to derive from a partially differentiated planetary body. Rather, these meteorites are full of tiny little grains that were formed in the outer atmospheres of giant stars, stars like Wolf-Rayet stars that shed enormous amounts of solar wind which condense into small grains and ices. These grains have never been processed by large gravitational bodies, such as rocks on Earth, so there's no way to simulate these fine-grained materials with terrestrial geology, and thus no way this meteorite came from Earth. Plus, the isotopic signature of the elements in this meteorite don't match that of Earth, and can't be changed to match Earth by any known natural process. So both macroscopically and microscopically, the fingerprints can't be terrestrial.


13. But if these really are extraterrestrial life, why then do they look just like Earth life?
    Well there are two answers and a continuum between them. Either the Earth infected comets, say, by ejecting bacteria into space from a Chicxulub event, or comets infected the Earth by raining down on it, and all variations between. And yes, experiments demonstrate that fist-sized chunks of comet can land on Earth without getting sterilized on the way down. In fact, farmers who collected the Orgueil meteorite reported frost appearing on the surface after the initial heat had dissipated. Lots of bacteria could have survived that journey as well as high-velocity ballistic tests in the laboratory.
    
    Louis Pasteur, the author of the controversial germ theory and critic of the spontaneous generation of life, thought perhaps comets carried germs, so he unsuccessfully tried to culture bacteria from Orgueil CI meteorite soon after it was collected. As far as we know, all the life on Orgueil has long since been fossilized, so perhaps it is not surprising that Pasteur failed. On the other hand, many anaerobes that might survive the cold and vacuum of space are not so easily cultured as aerobes, even by the pioneer Pasteur. So who knows if we might still succeed where Pasteur failed? In any case, we can't tell if life on Earth derives from comets or vice versa, but the data support both hypotheses.


14. Even if we suppose that life on Earth did not originate here, but came from a comet (panspermia), we still haven't explained where life on comets came from, so this theory explains nothing!
    Alas, even great papers can't explain everything. However, it would seem that by expanding the locations in which life might have started, we have actually improved rather than degraded the probability that life randomly began somewhere. What we have degraded, however, is the idea that all change observed on Earth is the result of evolution--for now it would seem possible that it could have equally well been transport. After all, your neighborhood doesn't change by old retired people evolving into young parents with kids, but rather by old folks moving out and new families moving in. Is it so disastrous for this additional transport option to sidestep a lot of conflicts currently roiling through the biology curricula?

If the data are sound, why is this paper so controversial?
As you can see from the previous question, it takes the evolution debate in unexpected directions. Some would see this as an attack on an accepted theory, others see it as a necessary evolution of science. I suppose the difference, as Sinclair said, is whether your livelihood depends on certain theories being funded or not.

I don't judge what others do, but as a scientist, I'd rather follow the data than the funding.

Next in the three-part series. . . NASA Astrobiology. . .

It was the best of times, and the worst of times. NASA was making new discoveries every day, discoveries that would change the course of science forever, and yet, they could not publish them for fear that it would destroy their government mandate, their public image. The discovery of microfossils on comets that made the news a month ago cannot be told without understanding the history of extra-terrestrials (ET) and NASA. It is a curious tale, with Darwinists embarassed and Designers triumphant except when the press show up, and it may still have even more twists to come, but the saga needs to be told for the sake of our children, and their children's children who may look up through the violet-black skies at the blue star called Earth.

The 1975 launch of a pair of billion dollar Viking spacecraft to Mars was the most ambitious planetary lander ever proposed or accomplished by NASA, and it contained an extremely complicated, cutting edge instrument to measure the atomic and molecular composition of the Martian atmosphere and soil--the Nier-Johnson double-focussing magnetic mass spectrometer. It also carried the simplest instrument ever devised to measure life--Gil Levin's labelled release experiment.

The expensive mass spectrometer had an enormous team of top-notch scientists from leading universities including Nier, the award-winning physicist inventor of this high resolution mass spectrometer that could electromagnetically bring energetic atoms to a sharp focus. To look for life they planned to bake some Martian dirt at 500 C and look for organic molecules (that nasty burnt cookie smell) coming out. The experiment worked nearly as planned (though sulfur in the soil turned out to poison the Palladium concentrator), but nothing was seen. No formaldehyde, no organics. Nothing.

The labelled release experiment had no famous scientists involved, but a principal investigator (PI) who had a PhD in environmental engineering, and who had invented an ingenious way to determine if seawater downstream of a sewage plant was contaminated by microbes. He took a sample of possibly contaminated water, mixed it with some radioactive sugar/nutrients, and then monitored the carbon dioxide coming out of the sample with a Geiger tube. If bacteria were present, they grew on the nutrients releasing radioactive carbon dioxide which made the Geiger tube buzz. The rounded bump of the Geiger-tube signal indicated that bacteria were growing, and the shape of the curve determined how many were in the sample at the start. Levin proposed to take a sample of Mars dirt, put on the nutrient, and watch for counts. As a control, he planned to bake the dirt at 500 C and then try the nutrients. The experiment worked flawlessly, on two landers on Mars, repeated two times--the baked soil had no effect, the unbaked soil showed a perfect carbon dioxide bump consistent with sparse bacteria. Mars had evidence of life.

What was NASA to do? Award the Nobel prize to a civil engineer, while the blue-ribbon scientists had nothing? Carl Sagan was an investigator on the camera on Viking, and from his many Cosmos programs, he knew what would happen to NASA if they unwisely announced a sanitation engineer had found evidence of extraterrestrial life. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" Sagan intoned, meaning that engineers are never going to be extraordinary enough to scoop scientists. A weird chemical compound called a "supermetalloperoxide" was postulated to exist in the soil and produce Levin's results. And Levin was told never to publish his conclusions again. (He tried to put them in a Russian journal, but a phone call from the Kremlin to the White House put a stop to it.)

From this point on, the NASA story began to take on the character of a certain Dr Jekyll in a famous story by Robert Louis Stevenson. The data supporting life or some aspect of life would come back from an innovative experiment, and then NASA would quietly bury it. Chris McKay told Levin some 7 years later that it was foolish to interpret his results as life because Mars was as dry as a bone, and life required water. McKay was a rising star in the field of planetary work, snagging his PhD in 1982 and directly going to work at NASA Ames so the mantle of the deceased Sagan fell heavily upon him. He began to assume more and more duties of directing major NASA astrobiology missions, a serious undertaking for such a young PhD. And McKay had made a good point, that life everywhere requires water, and without water, there cannot be life. However, he had made a serious scientific error--the Viking orbiters had taken pictures of the ice caps on Mars and there was no doubt that they had lots of water in them, enough to cover half of Mars with an ocean, but it was all in the form of ice.

So the equivocating began, and Mr Hyde began his scientific appearance. "Mars had ice and was dry, without liquid water because..."

..it was too cold? No, the landers had registered temperatures up into 50's F. Hyde would only talk about average temperatures after that.

...the air was too thin? No, the landers recorded barometric pressures around 6-12 mBar, where 6mBar was the threshold below which liquid water couldn't exist. Even clouds had been observed. Again, Hyde listed only the lowest barometric pressures. (Curious how the surface of Mars never dropped below 6mBar, as if there were a phase change at that pressure.)

..there was no geological evidence for water? No, the landers recorded extensive arroyos, canyons, and floodplains that had clearly been carved by water. Hyde proposed liquid CO2 had carved those canyons, despite the physical impossibility for liquid CO2 to exist at 6mBar pressure. There was even a picture from the European orbiter that showed a crater full of ice and snow. A subsequent mission used neutrons to demonstrate extensive permafrost in the soil of Mars.

..the cameras didn't record any evidence of H20? No, in 1979 a whole series of pictures was taken by both landers showing "frost"which Hyde claimed was CO2 frost, despite it being far too warm for dry ice to form. And frost-free shadows lay under the rocks as if the flakes had fallen from the sky. Hyde hid those pictures for 20 years, removing them from the archives until they accidently showed up in a NASA publicity poster in 1999. As an authorized investigator on Viking, Gil Levin should have seen these photos the week they came back, but he swore he had perused the archives extensively and never saw them until this poster was scanned and sent to him. Now they are back in the archives, but still mislabelled "Frost" rather than the more correct "Snow". (A complicated explanation now presently on the photo suggests is is both snow and frost, both CO2 and ice!)

An entire mission, the Phoenix lander, was sent to Mars twice to "look for water", which was not too risky, since everyone knew it was already there. (Even the sturdy rovers had uncovered ice when their wheels spun.) Sure enough Phoenix found water, but lo-and-behold, it also found "Mr Clean," otherwise known as perchlorate, the same cleanser which had been used to wash the lander before launch. Why was this such a big discovery? Chris McKay tells us why--because perchlorates would have accomplished exactly what the never-found "supermetalloperoxides" were supposed to do--confuse Levin's labelled release experiment. So the billion dollars spent on Phoenix were well spent--they found the expected ice, and they disconfirmed Levin.

(Now mind you, perchlorates have chlorine as well as oxygen, and chlorine has a unique, double-peaked atomic mass signature, so if there were parts per billion of chlorine in the soil, Viking's super-sensitive mass spectrometer would have found it, much less the parts per thousand "discovered" by wet chemistry (!!?) experiments on Phoenix. But Mr Hyde is only consistent in his persistence that life doesn't exist.)

We've been back to Mars several times since 1976, and it would seem a slight thing to refly the labelled release experiment, perhaps with some refinements to exclude perchlorates and supermetalloperoxides. Levin has proposed to make "mirror-image" nutrients that despite being chemically identical, are biologically inedible. The perchlorates wouldn't care, the Martian bugs would. Despite such proposals, Levin has been told NASA will never again search for life--only for the environments conducive to life. The Mars Science Lab is taking another billion or so dollars worth of equipment to Mars including a microscope, but one with a degraded objective that cannot see bacteria and no labelled release experiment. Mr Hyde now has a large army of deputies who carry on the schizophrenic task of "not talking about life on Mars".

So it was with some surprise that Richard Hoover's paper on microbial fossils on meteorites exploded into the news. Mr Hyde was caught flat-footed, and after some embarassing moments of not knowing anything about the work, finally settled on an ad hominem  attack on award-receiving NASA scientist Richard Hoover. It was not a well-thought out strategy, as it is already beginning to unravel. This required some triage, and Hyde has now come out with some papers purporting to show how methodically and carefully the Astrobiology community has been closing in on that elusive creature--extraterrestrial life--and why it differs from the hasty Mr Hoover.

Next Installment . . . Dr. Richard Hoover

The hiatus has ended.

After three months of major writing and rewriting, I was unable to meet the April 1 deadline for my ThM thesis, so the next deadline is April 1, 2012. On the other hand, this thesis is getting the most extensive rewriting I have ever done in my life, with expert English help from Dr Leslie Altena, a recent graduate of the Univ. of Pennsylvania Linguistics program and the director of the "Center for Theological Writing" at Westminster Theological Seminary. I never knew my native tongue was so complicated, with more rules than either my high school English teacher or Strunk & White ever hinted at. It makes Koine Greek look like child's play.

On the other hand, this thesis will be far more streamlined and understandable than my usual opaque prose. So I know it is effort well spent. Tune in next year for the latest installment on the thesis-that-will-never-end.

In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy some more blog posts on things scientific, linguistic, and theological.

We'll start with the scientific paper that made the top of Fox News and Drudgereport--the discovery of extraterrestial fossil life.